The TradeVine – Entertainment Trade Article Highlights August 4th, 2017
Welcome to the TradeVine whose purpose is to encourage the entertainment industry to read their trades: Variety, Backstage, Hollywood Reporter, etc. Enjoy learning about your industry.
Each Friday, The TradeVine seeks out a few of the informative trade articles you may have missed. Please visit the trade, itself, for the entire article.
Backstage – 9 Tips for Your First Time on Set, by Matt Newton
Your first TV role. It’s nerve-wracking. Everything you have trained for has been working toward this. You get your call time, show up (after not much sleep), wait for hours sitting in your tiny trailer obsessing over your three lines waiting for them to call you. You are about to fall asleep, when the second AD finally knocks on your door and says, “We are ready for you!” and walks you to the location.
Most actors have no idea what to expect when they walk onto a huge TV set for the first time. This isn’t a student film. There are dozens of people on the crew, and they already know each other. They are like a family, where everyone has a very specific job to help make you look good.
Everyone expects you to know what you are doing. But the truth is, you have absolutely no idea. Nothing prepares you for the reality of being on a real set. There are so many things going on that it’s hard to focus on your acting. So how do you prepare yourself mentally?
Here is what you need to know:
1. You will probably only get one rehearsal.
“What? But when I did ‘Grease’ in college I had 15 weeks of rehearsal.” Not anymore. If this is a one-hour drama or a single-camera comedy, you will most likely get one tiny little rehearsal, and you will be working with people you have never met before. You will say a brief hello to the director (who you probably saw at the callback), and who is extremely busy, and then you will run through the lines with the other actors at the location. They will discuss the blocking, talk briefly about the scene, and then do a “marking rehearsal,” where the crew comes in and they figure out where everyone will be standing so they can set up the lights. That’s right, dozens of eyes on you. Be confident and act like you have been doing this forever. Read Entire Artice Here
The Hollywood Reporter – The Mystery of L.A. Billboard Diva Angelyne’s Real Identity Is Finally Solved, by Gary Baum
Way before Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, the enigmatic blonde bombshell was famous for being famous, perpetually driving the streets of Hollywood in that pink Corvette. But her true identity has remained secret all these years … until now.
“Would you be interested in a story on Angelyne’s true identity?” the man wrote last fall under a pseudonym, referring to the enigmatic L.A. billboard diva who has been a pop culture icon of self-creation and self-marketing since the early 1980s — and is now regarded as a forerunner to Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and every personal-brand hustler on social media. “I have many details on her life — all well documented — from when her parents met to early adulthood. It’s very different from her public, concocted story — and more interesting.”
Angelyne is one of the vanishingly few contemporary public figures whose background has remained shrouded in mystery, along with the conceptual artist Banksy, Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto and aircraft hijacker D.B. Cooper. The man, who claimed to work in an undefined role for the federal government, said he was a hobbyist genealogist, occasionally taking on paid assignments in the field as an amusing side gig. A few years earlier, he’d decided it’d be fun to set himself the challenge of cracking Angelyne’s case. “And I did,” he explained. Read Entire Artice Here
Variety – Film Review: ‘The Dark Tower’, by Owen Gleiberman
Stephen King’s eight-novel multiverse has been turned into a slice of lean-and-mean metaphysical action pulp, featuring a stylishly stoic Idris Elba and a magnetically evil Matthew McConaughey.
As a critic, I know I’m supposed to do my homework. So let me confess right up front that I did notprepare myself to review “The Dark Tower,” the droolingly anticipated film version of Stephen King’s multiverse novel series, by consuming all eight books in the series. I had a go at “The Gunslinger” back in the ’80s (my one period of submersion in all things King), but I never followed through on the sequels. And when I learned that the movie version was going to clock in at a mere 95 minutes, I thought: It’s clear that the filmmakers have taken the 4,000-plus pages of King’s time-tripping, parallel-universe-hopping genre mash and compressed them into something that doesn’t pretend to be a page-by-page transcription of the novels. As a result, I decided to devote myself to what’s up on screen instead of what isn’t there.
Here’s what I saw. “The Dark Tower” has been plagued by tales of last-minute re-editing and multiple cooks in the kitchen, but the movie that’s come out of all this is no shambles. It aims low and hits (sort of). It’s a competent and watchable paranoid metaphysical video game that doesn’t overstay its welcome, includes some luridly entertaining visual effects, and — it has to be said — summons an emotional impact of close to zero. Which in a film like this one isn’t necessarily a disadvantage. Read Entire Artice Here
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