Molly Shannon landing a role in “Marie Antoinette” for acclaimed director Sophia Coppola

MOLLY SHANNON

2005 was a busy year for Ms. Shannon. The year started off with Molly landing a role in “Marie Antoinette” for acclaimed director Sophia Coppola. She recently wrapped production on the films “High, Wide and Handsome,” opposite her “Saturday Night Live” costar Will Ferrel and the independent features, “Shut Up & Sing” and “Gray Matters,” starring opposite Heather Graham.

Shannon’s other film credits include Miramax’s romantic comedy, “Serendipity,” opposite John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale, “Osmosis Jones,” the animated comedy co-starring Bill Murray and Chris Elliot, and the independent feature film, “Wet Hot American Summer,” opposite Janeane Garofalo and David Hyde-Pierce. Molly also appeared in a cameo role opposite Tim Allen in Disney’s “The Santa Clause 2.”

Among her most memorable moments on film, Molly portrayed Betty Lou Who in Ron Howard’s worldwide blockbuster, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” for Universal, and tackled the title role in Paramount’s hit comedy, “Superstar,” portraying everybody’s favorite Catholic schoolgirl, Mary Katherine Gallagher, a character Molly created in her days on “SNL.” Molly’s additional credits include, “A Night at the Roxbury,” “Analyze This,” “Happiness,” and “Never Been Kissed.”

Additionally, Molly Shannon spent six seasons as a member of “Saturday Night Live,” primarily known for the eclectic characters she created, such as Mary Katherine Gallagher, Helen Madden and Sally O’Mally. She is also praised for her parodies of Courtney Love, Liza Minnelli, Monica Lewinsky, and “The View’s” Meredith Vieira.

Her television credits include multiple guest appearances on “Will & Grace” and “Sex and the City,” among many others.

Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Molly earned a BFA in drama from New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. She currently lives in New York with her family.

SCARY MOVIE 4 was all about being “a clown”

For “Saturday Night Live” alumnus, Chris Elliott, saying yes to the call to do SCARY MOVIE 4 was a no-brainer: “I’ve been a fan of David Zucker’s from way back. ‘Airplane!’ sort of changed my whole perception of comedy, and I’ve never been in one of his movies and so I jumped at the shot.” Playing the village idiot from “The Village,” Chris totally went for it with the physical humor in his scenes but played it straight when it came to his lines. Impressed with the great jokes in the script, he shrugged, “When they’re funny on the page, you don’t have to do much to it.”

Reprising his role as George from SCARY MOVIE 3, Simon Rex laughs saying that it took him “about two seconds to get back into character because all I had to do was look around at David Zucker, and Anna Faris, and it all came back to me’.” Rex is “happy to be brought back…working with David Zucker, I couldn’t wait to come to work and just hang out on set.”

For Shaquille O’Neal, playing himself in SCARY MOVIE 4 was all about being “a clown” and having a good laugh. “People don’t understand that laughing is one of the biggest relievers of stress. You start to smile, you start to laugh, and then you forget about your problems.” O’Neal was also tickled to be doing a scene with Dr. Phil. “This is his first movie and I think he did a fabulous job,” Shaq says admiringly.

Dr. Phil bounces the compliments right back at O’Neal. “Shaq is so much fun, and he so gets into it that it really makes it easy.” The compliments keep flowing from Dr. Phil for David Zucker as well, “I mean of all the directors I’ve worked with, oh wait a minute, he’s the only one! So far, he’s just been a blast!”

Dr. Phil’s esteemed colleague, Oprah Winfrey, doesn’t personally appear in the movie, but her doppelganger, actress Debra Wilson, does. Four and a half hours of makeup, padding and prosthetics was all it took to transform Wilson into the Queen of Daytime Television. While Wilson had played Oprah before on “Mad TV,” she said spoofing Oprah in a movie was a first. “It’s a privilege because I feel like it’s trend-setting to get Oprah in a movie on the large screen. To skewer her…I can’t wait to barbeque her. I’m going to have her with a side of roasted potatoes!”

When offered a part in SCARY MOVIE 4, James Earl Jones’ wife loved the role the writers created for him and said to him, “Ooooh, you gotta do it!” There was no need to twist his arm, as Jones is a self-described “huge fan” of both the franchise and of David Zucker, with whom he worked on “Naked Gun.” Jones’ character is, mysteriously, named James Earl Jones and he will only say, cryptically, that his character speaks “about values and love.”

Playing the creepy basement guy from “War of the Worlds,” Michael Madsen was especially delighted to be cast in the part. After seeing the real “War of the Worlds,” his teenage son said, “Dad, you should have had that part.” Now he does. Madsen is also thrilled to have had the chance to work with Zucker, saying, “One thing I like about David is that he’s very collaborative…and we make up a lot of stuff on the spur of the moment, and a lot of stuff I did wasn’t even in the script.”

Leslie Nielsen is no stranger to Zucker’s directorial style, “the extraordinary attention he pays to the comedic detail, that’s what makes it good. The more credibility you bring to it, the more credible the humor is.” Describing Nielsen as “an old friend,” Bob Weiss was delighted that Nielsen was back for SCARY MOVIE 4, again playing the President of the United States. “It gives the story that big feel and that national feel that important things are happening. So we were thrilled to be able to have Leslie Neilson back again, and there’s really no one like him.” Nielsen felt his humor fits like a glove with Zucker’s, explaining, “I’ve always said things that are absolutely outrageous with a straight face treating them with all the gravity in the world.” Zucker loved it, saying, “He was there at the very beginning for “Airplane!” and you see Leslie as the straightest of the straight. He just doesn’t let on that he’s even in a comedy.”

Saddled with trying to keep a straight face while Nielsen did his Presidential-thing was comedian/actor Alonso Bodden, who plays the President’s Aide. Bodden concedes, “The thing about Leslie Nielsen is he’s just so funny. He’s just associated with funny so you know anything he’s gonna do is gonna be funny.” Bodden was such a fan that he said yes to the job without knowing anything about what he was going to do. “The script was top secret until I actually got there, so I had no idea what the scene was, or what I’d be saying…or anything!”

Fellow comedian, David Attell, had a different strategy for his role as “Knife man” in his “War of the Worlds” scene with Craig Bierko and Fabolous. “I’m not an actor. In fact, my game plan is to show up on time and not get fired. That’s my acting style.” Attell had a great time and found himself continuously marvelling at how the screenwriters managed to be so topical: “You always feel like you’re right on it….and I don’t know how they do it since it’s a movie and it comes out way later – they must have some psychics working on the film!”

As with SCARY MOVIE 3, SCARY MOVIE 4 has a roster of rappers on board. Spoofing a variety of “War of the Worlds” scenes, the music stars-come-actors were stoked about being a part of what many consider to be a classic and growing comedy tradition. Fabolous is happy that his fans get to “see a different side of me, and see me make people laugh.” Lil’ Jon, playing the guy with “the last working car in New York,” simply saying it’s “amazing” to be in a SCARY MOVIE picture. Young BloodZ, playing whacked-out refugees in their movie-acting debut concur, “We were very excited to get the call.” D-Ray, playing the mechanic, says, “It’s cool” to be cast because the franchise is “just entertaining.” He goes on to say, “I like to see good writing and to see people get a chance to act the fool. You don’t get to do that as adults, and I think SCARY MOVIE allows adults to act the fool, because that’s what I’m gonna do.” Patrice O’Neil, who plays a curious guy at the epicentre, loves how this franchise puts horror movies in perspective and points to his girlfriend who can now watch the “real” movies and find them hilarious. He says “She can watch it with these little parodies in mind.”

Chris Williams, who plays another “War of the Worlds” character, appreciates being a part of a film that attracts such a plugged-in audience. “The SCARY MOVIE fans have already seen all of the other movies also. They’re movie-going people, teenagers and young adults who see everything, and it’s all encapsulated into every year, or every other year when a new SCARY MOVIE comes out. They can appreciate it.”

Appropriately, Anna Faris sums it up best: “True fans know what they’re going to get into when they see a SCARY MOVIE. It’s a good time, not to be taken too seriously, not for people who are easily offended, and it’s just a lot of laughs.”

Carmen Electra is also a big fan of the SCARY MOVIE

When it came time to cast the movie, Weiss and Zucker knew exactly what they were looking for. Weiss summarizes: “I think in casting you have to strike an interesting balance between bringing in people that are new and fresh, and returning favorites from the previous instalments.

At the top of the list was Anna Faris, who couldn’t wait to reprise her role for the fourth time as Cindy Campbell. Although, unlike the eternally innocent Cindy, Faris admits she knew what she was in for this time. “It is like running a marathon in a sense. You really have to be able to roll with the punches and be game for whatever. They’d say, ‘Oh, do you mind just jumping off this small balcony?’ And I’d say ‘Oh, okay.’ I’m such a pushover,” she giggles. Directing Anna for the second time, David Zucker was hugely appreciative of Anna’s willingness to do whatever it took to make a scene funny and of her enormous talent, saying “It may not be easy for her, but she makes it look very easy when she’s on screen because she just has an instinct for this kind of comedy. She doesn’t try to joke it up and she knows how to play it straight. That’s why she’s so good at it.” Bob Weiss adds appreciatively, “Working with her is like you starting up a fine automobile. She knows her character, her instincts are great, and she really elevates the material.”

Anna’s tremendous experience with the SCARY MOVIE franchise was also a great feeling for her. “I feel a bit like a senior in high school. I think I have a little bit more ownership over the character.” While Anna continues to grow as a person and an actor, she marvels at the unchanging character she has come to love and know so well. “Sweet Cindy, she’s completely one-dimensional. Cindy Campbell is very earnest, very sincere, has a heart of gold, no sense of humor really. She’s a really straight person…she’s a little clueless. She’s not the smartest woman…(Yet) once again the fate of the world has been placed in her hands. And so I have to go out and save it.”

Anna is thrilled to be back working with Regina Hall, another four time SCARY MOVIE alumnus. Real life friends, Anna considers their hugely successful and ongoing comedic chemistry to be along the lines of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, “I just feel really fortunate that she’s been brought back because we both work really well together.” Regina Hall concurs, “I probably have more fun working with her than anyone else. It’s just so effortless. (Even) during the first SCARY MOVIE, we had the same kind of chemistry where it just worked.”

Anna observes, “You could not find characters more opposite than Brenda and Cindy. I mean Brenda’s sort of street smart, a little bit selfish, a little bit mean, a little bit sassy. And for whatever reason, she’s best friends with Cindy Campbell who’s completely innocent, kind of dumb, and naïve, and as white as you can be. And they’re best friends. It’s a great match and I think that the two of us have a lot of fun playing with the ideas of this very strange friendship.”

On Regina, David Zucker concurs, “she’s a really good actress and very funny.” Describing Regina and the character of Brenda as “an audience favorite,” Zucker feels that Brenda’s promiscuous character, the polar opposite to Cindy’s squeaky-clean persona, gives him and his writing team a chance to play with “the kind of jokes that we didn’t do in ‘The Naked Gun’ or ‘Airplane!’”

Anna Faris’ leading man in SCARY MOVIE 4 is Craig Bierko, an actor whom Bob Weiss describes as “a wonderful, wonderful surprise.” He goes on to say, “None of us had worked with him before, but from the auditions, really, we knew we had somebody special. And he is terrific in the movie.” Bierko loved getting the call to be a part of this project, especially because of the chance to work with David Zucker. “I’m a big David Zucker fan. The first time I saw “Airplane!” I thought ‘At least I’m not the only completely insane person because…that’s what it’s like inside my head! I laughed so hard I thought my brain was going to shoot through my forehead like an avocado pit.”

Zucker clearly appreciates the way Bierko’s brain works, saying simply “he gets it… I just had to walk toward him and he knew what I was thinking.” For Bierko, the experience of working with Zucker was a dream-come true. “When you finally hear him laugh, that’s all that matters. He may have seen it three hundred times, and you may shoot it the correct way three hundred more times. He’ll laugh if it’s funny. It just makes him laugh. And I trust his sense of humor. It’s served him very well.”

As Cindy’s boyfriend, Bierko plays the Tom Cruise character from “War of the Worlds.” Regarding the similarities between Cruise and himself, Bierko deadpans, “the one thing that we have in common that is undeniable is that both of our entire bodies are covered with skin. It kind of ends there.” On his character, Tom Ryan, Bierko shrugs, “he’s really dumber than a screen door. He could have a conversation with a screen door and lose. He has all the heroic instincts of a movie hero. But he just doesn’t really have the intelligence to back it up.”

Molly Shannon, who plays Tom Ryan’s long-suffering, acerbic-tongued ex-wife, was also enticed to act in SCARY MOVIE 4 by the prospect of reuniting with Zucker, with whom she worked on “My Boss’s Daughter.” Declares Shannon, “It’s all about the joke, working to find the joke, and protecting that joke.” She also appreciates the sophisticated way in which Zucker spoofs a film, “You’re not doing an exact impression of them or anything, and you’re just kind of doing an idea of the memory of what that scene might be.”

Shannon and Bierko play parents to Beau Mirchoff and Conchita Campbell, who are playing the kids from “War of the Worlds.” Says Zucker, “I think they’re every bit as good.” Weiss agrees, “They are terrific. And we put them in a variety of physical situations, and different comic situations and they both were great and really responded to the call.”

Conchita Campbell couldn’t have been happier to oblige, saying, “When I heard I got this role I was just so excited. I was like ‘my first feature film, yay!!’” Conchita loved working with Craig Bierko. In regards to him playing her father in the movie, she says: “He thinks he’s the greatest dad in the world, but he’s really not. He thinks he cares about them (his kids) so much and doesn’t know that he doesn’t even recognize his own children!”

Beau Mirchoff admits that he has a tough time keeping it together in his scenes with Bierko, “I messed it up, laughed a couple of times when it was something pretty funny and I couldn’t keep a straight face. But for the most part, you just do your job, right?” Mirchoff put his all into doing his job, especially because of the tremendous amount of respect he has for Zucker: “He’s awesome…I trusted the guy. So when he was talking to me, I really listened to him. He knows what he’s doing.”

Appreciation for Zucker, also enticed Bill Pullman to sign on for some tongue-in-cheek scenes from “The Village.” Zucker, who cast Pullman in his first movie, “Ruthless People,” recalls “he was one of the funniest people in “Ruthless,” so it was great to have him back.” Zucker was also delighted with the inside joke of having Pullman, who starred in the “The Grudge,” appear in a spoof of that movie. For his part, Pullman says spoofing a film he was in is a “bizarre dream-like thing for me where I was morphing between the two.” Pullman also appreciates the irreverence and the “cartoonish” quality of the franchise, meaning that “people can bash into walls, they can be powdered, smeared, drowned, and doused with dust and whatever and you love it!”

Playing the blind girl from “The Village,” Carmen Electra is also a big fan of the SCARY MOVIE “very out there” humor and “roller-coaster ride“ of surprises for audiences. “I was so excited to receive a call that they wanted me to be in SCARY MOVIE 4 because I was in the first one …and it was really fun. I love to make people laugh and do silly stuff and shocking things that people aren’t really expecting from a girl like me.”

THOMAS ACKERMAN, ASC (Director of Photography)

THOMAS ACKERMAN, ASC (Director of Photography)

Thomas Ackerman is a graduate of the University of Iowa. His first experience in motion picture industry came as an officer in the United States Air Force. While assigned to the 600th Photo Squadron in the Republic of Viet Nam, Ackerman commanded a combat documentation unit, achieving the rank of Captain before his discharge in 1971.

Ackerman then took a position with Charles Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker based in Washington D.C. with whom he spent three years working on political spots, culminating in the McGovern for President campaign.

In 1974, Ackerman joined Mike Robe to form Robe/Ackerman, Inc. The Hollywood based company grew quickly to offer a wide range of services in commercials, corporate film production, and television.

Beginning in early 1980’s Ackerman devoted himself to commercial shooting and the emerging phenomenon of MTV. Before the end of the decade he amassed a list of music video credits that included Bob Dylan, Ashford and Simpson, Stevie Nicks, Hart, Bob Seger, Linda Rondstadt, the Pretenders, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Aaron Neville, Carlos Santana, Eddy Money, Pat Benatar, Chaka Khan, the Manhattan Transfer, and many others.

To date, Ackerman’s international commercial credits include Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Chevrolet, Kodak, BMV, Sprite, Budweiser, Corona Beer, Michelob, McDonald’s, Toyota, Nestea, Fanta, Lipton’s Tea, Hertz, Yamaha, Pepsi, Revlon, Nike, Brooklyn Gum, Johnson & Johnson, Bose, Parmalat, Eastern Airlines, Aloha Airlines, Mountain Dew, Benson & Hedges, and Black & Decker Tools. He has also photographed special venue productions such as “Water,” the 65mm 3D attraction at Expo 84 in New Orleans as well as 2nd unit work on Disneyland’s 3D extravaganza, “Caption IO.”

But Ackerman is best known to movie audiences worldwide for his accomplishments as a cinematographer. His filmography lists titles such as “Jumanji” and Tim Burton’s classic “Beetlejuice,” as well as an earlier Burton short “Frankenweenie.” His credits also include “Roadhouse 66,” “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Back to School,” “Dennis the Menace,” “Baby’s Day Out,” “True Identity,” “My Favorite Martian,” “Eighteenth Angel,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” “George of the Jungle,” “The Muse,” “Beautiful Joe,” “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” “Rat Race,” “Snow Dogs,” “Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star,” and “The Battle of Shaker Heights.” Ackerman’s work has recently been seen in the boxoffice hit comedy “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” starring Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate. His most recent credits are Revolution Studio’s hit comedy “Are We There Yet?” Starring Ice Cube and Albert Brooks’ “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.”

In a departure from feature films, Ackerman photographed “Cinemagique” for Disney Studios Paris. Directed by Jerry Rees, this innovative film, starring Martin Short and Julie Delpy, is the cornerstone of the new Disney “Parc II” which opened in March 2002. He also shot the award-winning feature documentary “Los Zafiros,” for director Lorenzo DeStefan. Set in Cuba, the film had its premiere at the 2002 Havana Film Festival.

In 1999, Ackerman took the helm as director/cameraman on “The Spirit of Evolution,” for Zenturio Group UK. The industry’s first 360 x 220 degree “Dome Format” production, it opened as the featured attraction of the Autostadt Grand Pavillion inaugurated in May 2000 by Volkswagen A.G. in Wolfsburg, Germany. Shot in the Czech Republic, Italy, and South Africa, the film represents a benchmark achievement in special venue exhibition technology.

Ackerman lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife Paula and two children Caitlin and Alex. He is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers, The Directors Guild of America and the Motion Picture Academy Arts and Sciences.

Zucker returns to direct SCARY MOVIE 4, having directed SCARY MOVIE 3

DAVID ZUCKER (Director)

Laughs, laughs, and one more laugh thrown in for good measure has always been David Zucker’s guideline to generating a riotous comedy which leaves audiences doubled over in hilarity. Mixing equal parts slapstick and dry wit, Zucker created his own genre of comedy with the 1980 hit “Airplane!,” paving the way for other comedies in its vein such as the “Austin Powers” films, “Dumb and Dumber,” “Road Trip,” and the SCARY MOVIE trio of films. Known for his trademark hands on approach to directing comedy and his ability to bring out the funny side of the most serious dramatic actor, Zucker has proven himself a trailblazer of a genre, which has been imitated many times over, yet never truly replicated.

Zucker returns to direct SCARY MOVIE 4, having directed SCARY MOVIE 3, the third installment of the highly successful franchise for Dimension Films. SCARY MOVIE 3 continued the zany antics which began as a spoof on horror films such as “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” SCARY MOVIE 3 starred Queen Latifah, Charlie Sheen, Eddie Griffin, Regina Hall, Anna Faris, and Zucker alumnus Leslie Nielsen in an ensemble cast. This proved to be the right formula for success, as SCARY MOVIE 3 landed at the top of the box office, grossing over $48M in its opening weekend and grossing over $110M in total at the domestic box office. This time around, Zucker has delivered even more outrageous laughs and pushed the limits further than ever before.

Zucker’s first hit landed in 1980 with the success of “Airplane!,” for which he shared directing credits with his brother Jerry Zucker and long-time friend Jim Abrahams. Conceived by David as a “comedy without comedians,” “Airplane!” featured dramatic actors like Robert Stack and Peter Graves delivering zany dialogue with straight-laced sincerity. Unbeknownst to him, Zucker had created an entirely new drama which became a fresh beacon in the comedic world. The spoof became the surprise hit of 1980, taking over $83M in gross box office receipts and positioned Zucker and company as kingpins of Hollywood comedy. Zucker’s streak continued, in collaboration with Abrahams and his brother, with the secret agent spoof “Top Secret!” starring Val Kilmer and the biting farce “Ruthless People” starring Bette Midler and Danny DeVito, which became one of the top-grossing films of 1986, grossing over $71M.

In 1988, David Zucker ventured on to his first film as solo director. “The Naked Gun” starred Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin, a detective with a penchant for finding himself in awkward situations and public fiascos. Co-starring Priscilla Presley, “The Naked Gun” became a runaway hit, inspiring two follow-ups, “The Naked Gun 2,” which surpassed the original at the box office, and “The Naked Gun 33 1/3,” produced by Zucker, was also another box-office hit.

David Zucker started out after college with a few borrowed video tape decks and an old camera. He convinced brother Jerry and friend Jim Abrahams to join him in creating the Kentucky Fried Theater in the back of a bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. Moving to Los Angeles in 1972, their success continued with a new show, presenting their unique, satirical blend of videotaped, filmed, and live sketches. In five years, they became the most successful small theater group in Los Angeles history. In 1977, they collaborated on their first feature, aptly titled “Kentucky Fried Movie,” which became a hit independent release and remains a cult classic to this day.

In recent years, Zucker has also branched out into other genres, adding diverse projects to his producing credits. From such films as the taut thriller, “Phone Booth” starring Colin Farrell to the sentimental drama “A Walk in the Clouds” starring Keanu Reeves, Zucker has shown his wide range of talent and an eye for commercially successful material.

James Earl Jones’s voice is known by people of all ages

JAMES EARL JONES

James Earl Jones’s voice is known by people of all ages – “Star Wars” fans who know him as the voice of Darth Vader, children who know him as Mufasa from Disney’s “The Lion King,” and the countless people who use Verizon phone services, for which he has been the exclusive spokesperson for many years. Listening, one would never guess that he spent his childhood as a virtual mute due to a severe stuttering problem. With the help of an extraordinary high school teacher, Jones overcame his stutter and transformed his weakness into his greatest strength.

Born in Mississippi and raised in Michigan, James Earl Jones moved to New York City in 1955 after graduating from the University of Michigan and serving in the military. In 1960, renowned Broadway producer, Joseph Papp gave Jones one of his first major breakthroughs, casting him as Michael Williams in Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” This marked the beginning of Jones’s long affiliation with the New York Shakespeare Festival, with the title roles of “Othello,” “Macbeth,” and “King Lear” among his many performances for the company.

Based on his success in the theater, he was soon offered film and television roles. In the 1960s, Jones was one of the first African-American actors to appear regularly in daytime soap operas, and he made his film debut in 1964 in Stanley Kubrick's “Dr. Strangelove.”

Among his many screen credits are leading roles in John Sayles's “Matewan” (1987), “Field of Dreams” (1989), and the film version of the Alan Paton classic “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1995). He won Emmys for his portrayal of Junius Johnson in “Heat Wave,” the 1990 television drama about the 1965 riots in Watts, and of Gabriel Bird, a disgraced cop turned private investigator, in the 1990-92 series “Gabriel's Fire.”

Throughout his varied career, however, Jones has always made his biggest impression on stage. In 1969, he won a Tony Award for his performance as boxer Jack Johnson in the Broadway hit, “The Great White Hope” (which also garnered him an Oscar nomination for the 1970 film adaptation). He won a second Tony Award in 1987 for August Wilson's “Fences.” In addition to continuing his celebrated Shakespearian work, he has also enjoyed a long-standing collaboration with South African playwright Athol Fugard, acting in “The Blood Knot,” “Boseman” and “Lena,” and the critically acclaimed “Master Harold...and the Boys,” among others.

The recipient of two Tonys, four Emmys, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy--Jones was also honored with the National Medal of Arts in 1992 and the John F. Kennedy Center Honor in December 2002.

James Earl Jones recently starred on Broadway in On Golden Pond for which he was nominated for a Tony Award.

Carmen was seen in the Warner Brothers film “Starsky and Hutch” opposite Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson and Amy Smar

CARMEN ELECTRA

Carmen Electra stars in SCI FI Channel's hit animated series “Tripping the Rift”. The series revolves around a smuggled vessel led by a purple alien named Chode, who along with his misfit shipmates, battle enemies each week. Carmen will lend her voice to the role of the sexy and brilliant love slave "Six," the most advanced android ever created. Carmen was also seen on the NBC’s hit sitcom “Joey”. She plays herself as a character on “Deep Powder” which Joey Tribbiani stars in. In addition, Carmen was seen in WB’s one-hour drama “Summerland,” the ABC’s comedy, “Hope and Faith.” and served as host of Bravo’s reality competition “Manhunt: The Search for America’s Most Gorgeous Male Model.”

Carmen will be seen in the indie film “Getting Played” for writer-director David Silberg., and in “Dirty Love”, also starring Jenny McCarthy. She will also lend her voice to the Revolution Studios film “Lil Pimp.” Carmen is also working on the independent film “Searching for Bobby De Niro” a film about an actor who is tired of being cast as a mobster.

Carmen was last seen in the seven-part MTV series “‘Til Death Do Us Part: Carmen & Dave” which documented the lives of Carmen and Dave Navarro during the months leading up to their wedding and culminating with the wedding ceremony. MTV’s cameras captured Carmen and Dave as they juggled their professional lives, while planning the most important day of their life.

Last year Carmen released a DVD series about the new fitness craze, “Aerobic Striptease.” The series is a fun, friendly and accessible dance workout, with a totally new form of low-impact exercise that works the entire body. It teaches the essentials of dance, poise, grace, posture, and how to look good while getting into shape!

Carmen periodically appears as a part of “Pussycat Dolls Live,” a version of the show “The Pussycat Dolls” which launched in May 2002 at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip in LA. “The Pussycat Dolls” are a contemporary, burlesque cabaret act that was founded as an opening act for Johnny Depp’s Los Angeles club, The Viper Room. Reminiscent of Berlin in the 1930’s with its lavish costumes and wild styling, “The Dolls” have a huge celebrity following. The show features a cast of the hottest music video dancers and has featured surprise guests such as Gwen Stefani, Christina Applegate, Brittany Murphy, Christina Aguilera and Charlize Theron. Carmen continues to make special appearances with “The. . . Dolls.”

Juggling effortlessly between the big and small screen, Carmen co-hosted the MTV game show “Singled Out” with Chris Hardwick and then hosted her on show on the MTV Network “Carmen Electra’s Hyper Mix” in Florida. Carmen was a series regular on “Hyperion Bay” as well as “Baywatch.” She has guest starred on a variety of prime-time comedies including “Mad TV,” “All That,” “Just Shoot Me,” “Two Guys and A Girl,” Comedy Central’s “Viva Variety” “Off-Centre” and “Baywatch Nights.” Other recent television credits include an episode of UPN’s hit series “Eve” ABC’s “It’s All Relative”, MTV’s “Monster Island” and “Livin Large”, “Battle Bots”, the “Baywatch” movie and the ABC family series “Dance Fever”.

Carmen was seen in the Warner Brothers film “Starsky and Hutch” opposite Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson and Amy Smart for director Todd Phillips. Additionally, she was in the Dimension comedy, “My Bosses’ Daughter,” with Ashton Kutcher and Molly Shannon. Other film credits include “Sol Goode” the indie film “Perfume,” which made its debut at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, SCARY MOVIE, “Get Over it,” and “The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human,” and Nickelodeon’s “Good Burger.”

A native of the mid-west, Carmen grew up near Cincinnati, Ohio, and got her first break when a scout for ‘Prince’ spotted her dancing and asked her to come and audition for “Prince” for his new video and tour. She released a self-titled debut album for Prince’s Paisley Park label in 1992 and produced a top 20 hit on dance charts with “Get on Up.”

It’s a SCARY MOVIE comedy; Which means that in order to set the scene

When it came to creating the look of SCARY MOVIE 4, David Zucker was very clear about what he wanted: “let the script do the work.” Bob Weiss elaborates, “One of the keys to doing this kind of parody is to stimulate an archetype in the audience’s mind or a specific movie in the audience’s mind. They have an expectation of where that scene might go, based on the original movie and then we pull the rug out from underneath them…And to do that you need a great, great production team. And we were very lucky with our designer, Holger Gross, and with Tom Ackerman, our Cinematographer.”

Production Designer, Holger Gross (“Stargate: The Movie”, “The Chronicles of Riddick,” “The Negotiator,”) spent a lot of time studying the movies being spoofed asking, “What is the essence of that particular scene? What is the mood? What is the atmosphere and so on?” Gross admits, “It’s very different for me working this way, not actually doing my own concept that I set at the beginning.” Zucker recognizes what he was asking of Gross and his team, saying, “Their biggest challenge was to get everything done on time. Often, we were writing stuff in the morning and they had to have the set built in the afternoon. Holger has just done some amazing work.”

Zucker has equal praise for the rest of the team, including costume designer, Carol Ramsey: “(She) is really at the top of the field. We have a short-hand, she knows how to design so it doesn’t intrude.” Carol explains, “Costume design is not about making great little outfits. It’s about developing the character that is defined by the script. David Zucker has really specific ideas. His team, they have very specific ideas, and their aesthetic is they want it to be very normal. They never want to do a costume gag, unless it’s like motivated by the script.”

Director of Photography, Tom Ackerman, underscores that “it’s a SCARY MOVIE comedy;
Which means that in order to set the scene, we have to, in essence, shoot it not like a comedy. We want to create an image that is sometimes scary, that is sometimes
otherworldly, that is often action-packed and dramatic in a way that comedies sometimes are not. So the more on-the-nose the imagery is, the better the jokes work.”

Stunt Co-ordinator, Jacob Rupp, worked hard to design some “on-the-nose” sequences from the “War of the Worlds” epicentre scene. “We probably hired a hundred and twenty stunt people,” Rupp said. He also trained Anna Faris for many of her stunts and was impressed with how well she did, saying, “She keeps saying she’s not a very athletic person but she always pulls it off. Every time I had to work with her on stunt stuff. She’s always come through. She actually surprised herself and me.”

For Special Effects Co-ordinator, Alison Ramsey, the goal was to create a specific feeling for viewers: ”we’re parodying so that the audience immediately, and subconsciously, sort of puts themselves back in that story mode (of the original movie being spoofed). So, we almost have the same amount of work to do as the original, but with a much smaller budget, in a very short time frame, and also, we have all these additional gags on top of the original material.”

Tom Ackerman perhaps sums it up best in describing how, in spite of the many movies, and therefore styles, that were being emulated, the whole production team was ultimately working toward a seamless product: “At the end of the day, our movie had to be one movie. In essence, it’s visually the same thing that David, Craig, and Bob and the writers did with the structure of the film itself…Likewise, we wanted to make sure that, on the visual end, that this was one movie.”

Challenging? Absolutely! But for behind-the-scenes people like Carol Ramsey, going to work on the set of SCARY MOVIE 4 with David Zucker and Bob Weiss was usually a blast: “they are some of the funniest people I’ve every met in my life!”

In SCARY MOVIE 3, we expanded on the horror theme

While the SCARY MOVIE franchise began with the inspired comedy of the Wayans brothers, its appeal expanded to an even larger audience when writer and director David Zucker signed on for SCARY MOVIE 3. "Airplane!" alumnus Leslie Nielsen best describes Zucker’s practically patented brand of humor as “credible insanity.” Zucker brings a depth and breadth of jokes to the screen that virtually guarantees a laugh-a-second experience for moviegoers of all ages.

For the self-described “oldest living working comedy director,” the decision to come back to direct and co-write SCARY MOVIE 4 was based on having another good time. David Zucker says “SCARY MOVIE 3 was a big success and it was a lot of fun, and so we wanted to work with the same team, to work with Bob Weiss again, and (writer/producer) Craig Mazin, and the actors too -- Anna Faris and Regina Hall.”

For Bob Weiss, it was the “size of the success of SCARY MOVIE 3” that confirmed the decision to do a sequel. “We were confident in it as a good and funny movie. But to have it be the movie that had the largest October opening in movie history was beyond our expectations. Of course, when you have a movie that big, there’s bound to be a sequel.”

With big success come even bigger audience expectations. The long-time comedic team of Weiss – with whom Zucker worked on “Kentucky Fried Movie” in 1977 – and relatively new addition, Craig Mazin, were inspired to review their number one rule of movie-making. “When it came time to do SCARY MOVIE 4, the first principal really was to work harder,” summarizes Weiss. “A lot of times with sequels in Hollywood, people phone it in a little bit and don’t work as hard, and we have the opposite philosophy. We work harder. We work harder on the material, we work harder on the production, we work harder to make it more appealing perhaps even to a bigger audience.”

Weiss, Zucker and the team took up the challenge and began by committing to an extremely fast turn around between the release of the real movies and the ones being spoofed. Weiss explains, “These are movies that our audience really should have just seen.”

They also diversified their repertoire of spoof material. “In SCARY MOVIE 3, we expanded on the horror theme,” says Zucker, “but in FOUR we even go beyond that.” “[Including] science fiction” Weiss elaborates, “and being able to parody the media, or politics, or other things that are ever present in the minds of the audience, that’s great fun for us, and it really enriches the movie.”

Zucker also called up an old friend. After a twenty-five year break, he reunited with writer Jim Abrahams. Of Abrahams, Zucker says, “He made some wonderful contributions, and everybody loved having him around, including Craig Mazin, who had never really worked with Jim before.” While Jim added some great laughs, Zucker is quick to point out that “Craig wrote probably ninety percent of what’s in the movie, and everybody else fills it in between. But you know, I write more than his ninety percent. So together that’s a hundred and eighty percent. So just put me even with Mazin. Everybody else, I guess, has that last twenty percent.”

Crazy math aside, for his part, all writer Craig Mazin cared about was getting a joke right, even if it meant writing the script in the middle of shooting a scene: “David and I, the nice thing is we act as a check and balance on each other. We riff off of each other and we come up with something really great right there in the moment. And then, why not put it in?”

That kind of fearless, working-without-a-net writing and directing is a part of the reason so many actors walk over other movie scripts to work with David Zucker. Leslie Nielsen calls Zucker “incredibly astute and funny.” Bill Pullman muses that Zucker is “beautifully un-ego-oriented – he’s in charge, and yet he allows a lot of input.” Regina Hall loves that, “David’s jokes are set up to have a clever reveal. It’s not just about the punch-line.”

The other great draw for actors is that while David Zucker may be the ultimate professional, he’s also the ultimate fan. Probably no one laughs as hard as the director himself when things are going right on the set. Anna Faris chuckles, “He can be very childlike sometimes when he is giggling. One of the days, I had to wear a fake eye. It was very weird and creepy and he couldn’t stop laughing. We could barely get the take because I thought he was going to pee his pants, he was laughing so hard.” Michael Madsen agrees: “We were laughing so hard one afternoon that his gum flew out of his mouth. That was a great moment.

The cast of SCARY MOVIE 4 includes Anna Faris

What could possibly be more irreverent, funnier and, well, scarier than SCARY MOVIE 3? SCARY MOVIE 4, of course! It’s about to ignite, insult and induce uncontrollable laughter in audiences everywhere! Writer/director David Zucker and writers Craig Mazin (who also serves as a producer) and Jim Abrahams have re-teamed to push the limits of comedy in this latest instalment of the wildly successful franchise. No block-buster movie or pop culture icon is safe from their zany humor: “War of the Worlds,” “The Grudge,” “The Village,” “Saw,” “Saw II,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Brokeback Mountain” and more are all mercilessly spoofed with hilarious results.

This time around, the ever-naïve Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris), seeking a career in home healthcare, finds work with a creepy old lady (Cloris Leachman) in an even creepier old house haunted by a ghostly presence. Throw in a good-looking guy next door and the threat of aliens intent on global domination and Cindy’s instantly up to the top of her extremely blond head in danger. Our fearless heroine catapults into action once again struggling to decipher ominous messages from the beyond, looking for love in some very weird places and trying to save the world from mass destruction. As she struggles to discover life-saving answers, Cindy encounters horrific plane crashes, bodacious blind girls, village idiots, dishevelled rappers, kinky contraptions, psycho survivalists, alien sphincters and even Oprah! It’s a relentless movie theatre invasion of non-stop, fall-on-the-floor-laughing jokes.

The cast of SCARY MOVIE 4 includes Anna Faris as fledgling home healthcare worker, Cindy Campbell, Craig Bierko as Cindy’s love interest - the handsome, dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers, Tom Ryan, Regina Hall as Cindy’s best friend, the savvy and outrageously promiscuous Brenda, Leslie Nielsen as the President of the United States, Bill Pullman as Henry, the stern leader of “the village,” Molly Shannon as Tom Ryan’s very ticked-off ex-wife, Chris Elliott as “the village” idiot and Carmen Electra as blind-villager Holly. The film also features Dr. Phil, Shaquille O’Neal, Michael Madsen, Cloris Leachman, Anthony Anderson, Kevin Hart, Chris Williams, Alonzo Bodden, David Attell, D-Ray, Chingy, Lil’ Jon, Young BloodZ and Fabolous. The movie is produced by Robert K. Weiss (SCARY MOVIE 3, all three “Naked Gun” movies, “The Blues Brothers,” and “Kentucky Fried Movie”).

SCARY MOVIE 4 is set to invade a theatre near you with outrageous send-ups of War of the Worlds

What do you get when you mix fearless comedic genius with the latest box-office blockbusters? You guessed it. On April 14th, the SCARY MOVIE gang is back with the most hilarious and irreverent instalment yet! SCARY MOVIE 4 is set to invade a theatre near you with outrageous send-ups of “War of the Worlds,” “The Grudge,” “The Village,” “Saw” and “Saw II,” “Million Dollar Baby” and much more. Legendary comedy director David Zucker and producer Bob Weiss reunite to take aim at some of the best fright films, the latest box office hits, music, current events, pop culture, and your favorite celebrities.

Anna Faris and Regina Hall return to SCARY MOVIE 4 as the loveable, dim-witted Cindy Campbell and her self-serving, sex-crazed pal, Brenda, joined this time around by Craig Bierko (“Cinderella Man”), as the cute-but-utterly clueless Tom Ryan.

Together, they battle to save the world from a ruthless alien invasion. And, in true SCARY MOVIE tradition, the outrageous celebrity cameos are non-stop. Those featured include: Carmen Electra, Shaquille O’Neal, Dr. Phil, Bill Pullman, Chris Elliott, Molly Shannon, Anthony Anderson, Kevin Hart, Michael Madsen, rappers Chingy, Lil' Jon, Fabolous and Young Bloodz, Leslie Nielsen returning as our fearless Commander in Chief, plus many more surprises.

In SCARY MOVIE 4 nothing - and we mean NOTHING - is off limits!

Leslie Nielsen, a veteran of over 100 motion pictures and more than 1500 television appearances

LESLIE NIELSEN

Also making a return appearance as president of the United States from SCARY MOVIE 3 is Zucker alumnus Leslie Nielsen, a veteran of over 100 motion pictures and more than 1500 television appearances. He built a reputation portraying manly authority figures (including the Space Ship Commander in the sci-fi classic "Forbidden Planet" and the Captain of the ill-fated cruise ship in "The Poseidon Adventure") before he turned his image inside out with a hysterically funny deadpan performance as the loopy doctor in Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker's "Airplane!" (1980). He continued to team with the ZAZ comedy team on the TV series "Police Squad!" on which he originated the role of police Lt. Frank Drebin, which he re-created in "The Naked Gun," in the 1991 sequel "Naked Gun 2 1/2" and again in "Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.” Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, the son of a Canadian Mounted Policeman, Nielsen spent his earliest years living near the Arctic Circle, and later served as an aerial gunner in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

His television career began in 1950 with a "Studio One" appearance with Charlton Heston, and he went on to act in 46 live programs in the very heart of TV's Golden Age. In 1954, Nielsen was brought to Hollywood to star in Michael Curtiz's "The Vagabond King." This was followed by a long-term contract at MGM where he starred in such films as "Ransom!” "The Opposite Sex" and "The Sheepman.” Later loaned to Universal, he starred in “The Bachelor” and "Tammy and the Bachelor” opposite Debbie Reynolds. Throughout the sixties and seventies Leslie was seen regularly in action series such as "Wagon Train," "The Fugitive," "The Virginian," "Cannon," "Kojak," "S.W.A.T." and "Vegas." He also starred in seven series of his own in that period, including "The New Breed,” "Peyton Place,” "The Protectors,” "Bracken's World" and in the mini-series "Backstairs at the White House.” On stage, he starred in Los Angeles opposite Carol Burnett in “Love Letters” and toured the U.S. and Europe with "Darrow.” Nielsen's numerous films include "Prom Night,” George Romero's "Creepshow,” "Wrong Is Right,” "Reckless Disregard,” "Soul Man,” "Home Is Where the Hart Is,” "Nuts,” "Repossessed” (a 1990 spoof on exorcism), "Surf Ninjas,” "Dracula--Dead, and Loving It," comedy, "Spy Hard," “Rent-A-Kid,” “Family Plan,” the live-action version of “Mr. Magoo,” “Wrongfully Accused,” “2001: A Space Travesty,” “Kevin of the North,” and the television movie “Santa Who.” He also appeared in “Men With Brooms.”

In 2001 and 2002, Nielsen starred in the Canadian Comedy Network series “Liography.” Other television credits include “Who’s The Boss,” “Golden Girls” and the role of God on “Herman’s Head.” He has appeared as the richest man in town in "Evening Shade”; as a Mountie on “Due South” and in various Hallmark specials, including “Harvey” in 1999. In 1995, he received UCLA’s Jack Benny Award, following in the footsteps of such comedy greats as Johnny Carson, Lili Tomlin, Steve Martin, Whoopie Goldberg, George Burns and Carol Burnett.

Following his appearance in “Scary Movie 3,” a film which marked the actor’s reunion with David Zucker who he credits with engineering his comedy career (“Airplane!,” “Naked Gun”) he went on to star in the 4-D film “Pirates”, which in July of 2004 was added to the ride attraction of Las Vegas’ Luxor Hotel.

Madsen reunited with Quentin Tarantino for the blockbuster Kill Bill, Volume 2

MICHAEL MADSEN

Just as his credits run the gamut from the hippest of cult films to the big studio blockbusters, Madsen’s characters transcend beyond both ends of the spectrum. He is the ear-slicing Mr. Blonde in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” dancing and humming to the tune “Stuck in the Middle with You;” the deviant killer in “The Getaway” with Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin; the psycho killer in John Dahl’s “Kill Me Again;” the Mafia family captain Sonny Black in “Donnie Brasco” with Al Pacino and Johnny Depp; the over-the-top cop in “Mulholland Falls;” and the hard-core government operative in “Species.” Yet, Madsen is also the lovable and caring father in “Free Willy;” Susan Sarandon’s supportive, understanding boyfriend in “Thelma and Louise;” the gentle Virgil Earp opposite Kevin Costner in “Wyatt Earp” and Halle Berry’s CIA boss in “Die Another Day.”

Madsen reunited with Quentin Tarantino for the blockbuster “Kill Bill, Volume 2.” He also appeared in “Sin City,” “Frankenstein” with producer Martin Scorsese, and “Red Light Runners” in which he stars and co-produces. Madsen starred in FX’s film “44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shootout” (which earned the highest ratings in the history of FX) with Mario Van Peebles and Ron Livingston. In addition, Madsen shot the epic European Western “Muraya” (AKA “Blueberry”) with Vincent Cassel and Juliette Lewis. Madsen starred in the series “Big Apple” and also starred as “Miller the Killer,” in the remake of the 1952 Gary Cooper/Grace Kelly Western “High Noon,” opposite Tom Skerritt, Reed Diamond, Maria Conchita Alonso and Susanna Thompson.

He is currently in production on “Afghan Knights,” directed by Allan Harmon.

His compilation of short stories and poems entitled Burning in Paradise further proves his capabilities as an artist, winning the Independent Book Publisher’s “Firecracker Poetry Book of the Year” Award. This was followed by Blessing of the Hounds, and his third book of prose entitled 46 Down.

Born in Chicago, Madsen and his two siblings, including actress Virginia Madsen, were reared in a close-knit family environment. He began his career on screen with guest-starring roles on “Miami Vice,” “Cagney and Lacey,” and “St. Elsewhere,” to name a few, only to make his film debut in the hit feature “War Games.” After roles in “Racing With the Moon,” “The Natural,” “Kill Me Again” and “War and Remembrance,” among others, Ridley Scott cast him in “Thelma and Louise” opposite Susan Sarandon, and Madsen became an “overnight success.”

With a long list of features in such films as “Money for Nothing,” “Man With a Gun,” “The Doors,” “Last Days of Frankie the Fly,” “The Florentine,” to name a few, in addition to television stints on “Inspectors 2,” “The Outsiders,” “Quantum Leap,” “Tour of Duty,” and “The Hitchhiker,” Michael also starred in his own series “Vengeance Unlimited,” a one-hour drama on ABC where he played Mr. Chapel, vigilante extraordinaire.

Leachman’s more than 35 films for television include In Broad Daylight, Honor Bright, Fine Things

CLORIS LEACHMAN

Leachman’s chameleon-like dramatic range has won legions of fans and garnered her a record eight Emmy Awards®, Golden Globe Award®, National Board of Review Award and British Academy Award. She earned an Oscar® for her riveting portrayal of lonely Texas housewife “Ruth Popper” in the landmark film “The Last Picture Show.”

Arguably one of the most prolific actresses in Hollywood, Leachman was seen in several big screen releases including: “The Longest Yard” with Adam Sandler and Chris Rock for Paramount Pictures and “Sky High” with Kurt for Disney. Leachman was nominated for a SAG Award for Best Supporting Actor Female, Motion Picture for her portrayal of the wine-soaked jazz singing “Evelyn” in the Sony/Columbia feature “Spanglish” with Sandler and Tea. On the small screen in 2005, along with her recurring role as “Grandma Ida” on Fox’s “Malcolm in the Middle,” Leachman co-starred in the Lifetime mini-series “Beach Girls” with Rob Lowe and Julia Ormond as well as guest-starred on CBS’ “Two and a Half Men.” The actress was honored with two primetime Emmy Award nominations in 2005 for her work on “Malcolm in the Middle” and CBS’ “Joan of Arcadia.” These were her 19th and 20th Emmy nominations respectively. Currently, Leachman stars with Sir Ben Kingsley and Annette Bening in HBO’s “Mrs Harris.”

Leachman has delighted television viewers for generations. In the 1970s, millions tuned in to watch Leachman’s self-absorbed yet endearing “Phyllis Lindstrom” on the legendary “Mary Tyler Moore Show” and popular spin-off series “Phyllis.” Leachman would receive four Emmy® nominations and two Emmy Awards® for her work on “Mary Tyler Moore” and an Emmy® nomination and Golden Globe Award® for “Phyllis.” These added to her collection of Emmy Awards® for “A Brand New Life” and CBS’ “Cher Special.”

The 1980s brought more unforgettable television roles and further acclaim. Most notably, viewers found comfort in the sage advice dispensed by “Beverly Ann,” Leachman’s character on the popular NBC series “The Facts of Life.” Leachman also added Emmy® number five for ABC’s “The Woman Who Willed a Miracle” and a sixth Emmy Award® for her brilliant eight-minute soliloquy for the “Screen Actors Guild 50th Anniversary Celebration.”

Leachman’s more than 35 films for television include “In Broad Daylight,” “ Honor Bright,” “Fine Things,” “Love is Never Silent,” “The Demon Murder Case,” “Dixi Changing Habits,” “A Girl Named Sooner,” “Backstairs at the White House,” and Emmy® nominated performances in “The Migrants,” “It Happened One Christmas,” and “Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter.”

The 1990s and 2000s have been especially busy for Leachman. 1998, the actress won a seventh Emmy® for her work as “Aunt Mooster” on the CBS series “Promised Land.” In 2001, Leachman was handpicked by Ellen Degeners to star as her mother in the CBS primetime series “The Ellen Show.” In 2005, Leachman received her fifth Emmy® nomination for the FOX series “Malcolm in the Middle.” In 2002, she won a record-breaking eighth Emmy Award® for her recurring role as Jane Kaczmarek’s mother “Grandma Ida” on the series.

On the big screen, Leachman’s richly woven characters have secured her place in film history and a survey of her more than 40 feature films demonstrates her breathtaking acting range.

Along with her Best Supporting Actress Oscar®, Leachman won a National Board of Review Award and a British Film Academy Award for her unforgettable “Ruth Popper” in the critically hailed film “The Last Picture Show.”

Leachman’s dramatic skill is matched only by her ability to make us laugh. Her calculating “Frau Blucher” in Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” and twisted “Nurse Diesel” in “High Anxiety” are comedy classics. Younger audiences know her as the spry “Granny” in the popular feature film “The Beverly Hill Billies” and “Martha” in the animated MTV feature “Beavis and Butthead do America.” Other big screen credits include “The Animal” (opposite Rob Schneider), “The Amati Girls,” “Hanging Up” (Opposite Diane Keaton, Meg Ryan and Lisa Kudrow), “Music of the Heart” (opposite Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, Aidan Quinn and Gloria Estefan) and “Iron Giant.”

Leachman’s formidable stage work includes over two-dozen productions. Most notably, she starred in “Grandma Moses: An American Primitive” (national tour), which left critics spellbound. She also starred in the national tour of “Showboat,” “The Oldest Living Graduate,” “Butterflies are Free,” “Same Time Next Year,” “Twigs” and “The Housekeeper.” Broadway roles include those in “As You Like It,” “South Pacific,” “Lo and Behold,” “John Loves Mary,” “Sundown Beach,” “Sunday Breakfast,” “Dear Barbarians,” “King of Hearts,” “Touch of the Poet” and “Masquerade.”

The actress grew up outside Des Moines, Iowa. After attending Northwestern University, Leachman was named “Miss Chicago” and subsequently became a runner-up in the Miss America pageant. After early success on the New York stage, Leachman ventured to Hollywood and made her screen debut in the Mickey Spillane shocker, “Kiss Me Deadly.”

MARC PLATT is an independent producer whose company

MARC PLATT (Produced by) is an independent producer whose company, Marc Platt Productions, produces feature films, television and theater.

Among the films Platt has produced are the smash hits Legally Blonde and Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, starring Reese Witherspoon (both of which have each grossed more than $150 million worldwide); Honey; Josie and the Pussycats; The Perfect Man; and The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising.

Also being released this year (in addition to Wanted) is Rachel Getting Married, for Sony Classics, which reunites Platt with Oscar®-winning director Jonathan Demme on the film starring Anne Hathaway and Debra Winger. Platt’s upcoming film projects include Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, directed by Edgar Wright and starring Michael Cera, and Nine, with Rob Marshall directing.

Platt produced Broadway’s blockbuster hit musical Wicked, which now has companies on Broadway, in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Stuttgart, and on tour throughout the U.S., with new companies opening shortly in Australia and Holland. Platt also produced the Broadway debut of Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Greenberg’s play Three Days of Rain, starring Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper and directed by two-time Tony Award winner Joe Mantello.

Additionally, Platt produced Matthew Bourne’s ballet Edward Scissorhands, a smash hit in London, Asia and the U.S., for which Platt won his second Drama Desk Award.

Platt won the Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries for Empire Falls, starring Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Platt also executive-produced Once Upon a Mattress (ABC), starring Carol Burnett and Tracey Ullman and the Emmy Award-winning miniseries The Path to 9/11 (ABC).

Prior to establishing his production company, Platt served as president of production for three movie studios (Orion, TriStar and Universal). During his tenure as a studio president, Platt developed and guided the production of such films as The Silence of the Lambs; Sleepless in Seattle; Philadelphia; Rudy; As Good As It Gets; My Best Friend’s Wedding; Jerry Maguire; American Pie; Out of Sight; October Sky; and The Mummy.

Platt is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and The Broadway League (formerly the League of American Theatres and Producers).

Wanted: J.G. JONES

J.G. JONES (Based on the Series of Comic Books by) does not like you. He has never liked you, and it wasn’t he who sent that anonymous valentine card and rose. He wants you to stop throwing rocks at his window and stop calling and hanging up. Oh, and stay away from the basement, too.

Jones got a late start in comics after a career as a famous painter failed to materialize. He has always drawn pictures, beginning with the little-used medium of screwdriver on car door. Comics were just the first time folks were willing to pay cash money for his scribblings.

Jones has worked on titles such as “Shi,” “Black Widow,” “Marvel Boy” and “Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia,” as well as the most recent special hardcover edition of “Wanted.” He has also drawn and painted any number of covers, with extended runs as cover artist for “Codename: Knockout,” “Y: The Last Man,” “Wonder Woman” and the DC Comics weekly series, “52.”

Jones grew up in Louisiana, where he learned survival techniques which translated poorly to life in and around New York City—in fact, some of these techniques can get you arrested. FYI.

Now a resident of the great state of New Jersey, Jones wants you to know that the Internet is not your savior, but, if you like, you can leave a message.

MARK MILLAR has written some of the most successful English-language comics

MARK MILLAR (Based on the Series of Comic Books by) has written some of the most successful English-language comics of the last few years and has, for six years running, been the best-selling British writer working in America. His current projects are “Ultimates 2” with artist Bryan Hitch; “Ultimate Fantastic Four” with artist Greg Land; and “Marvel Civil War” with artist Steve McNiven. “Civil War” has been Marvel’s best-selling series in over a decade and was featured on everything from CNN to MTV in June 2006, for the public unmasking of Spider-Man. Millar is also a senior writer/story consultant at Marvel Entertainment in New York and the creator of his independent Millarworld line of books. Millarworld was launched in 2004 as a means of generating new, creator-owned properties for comics, television and movies. The first of these titles was “Wanted.”

Millar was born in Coatbridge, Scotland, on December 24, 1969. Growing up, he was into all the same time-wasting pursuits you were into and so, when the opportunity arose, he dropped out of university in the final year of his degree and became a full-time writer. After stints at 2000AD and DC Comics and a brief foray into British television, Millar’s first real success was “The Authority” for Wildstorm Productions and a subsequent string of hits at Marvel. These started with the creation of “Ultimate X-Men” and “The Ultimates,” before being followed by “Marvel Knights Spider-Man,” “Ultimate Fantastic Four,” “Wolverine” and “Civil War.” Outside of Marvel, he created the best-selling “Superman: Red Son” graphic novel, “Wanted,” “Chosen” and “The Unfunnies.” The most recent wave of Millarworld books launched in February 2008 with “Kick-Ass,” “the most violent comic in the history of the human race,” where Millar reteams with John Romita, Jr., the artist on his smash-hit “Wolverine” run and co-creator of Frank Miller’s “Daredevil: Man Without Fear.”

He is currently writing two major superhero screenplays and acting as an executive producer on one of his creator-owned properties. In his downtime, he writes a monthly Millarworld column for his friends at SFX magazine and occasional pieces for a variety of British newspapers and magazines. He lives with his wife, Gillian, his small daughter, Emily, and a menagerie of pets, including two rabbits, two guinea pigs, a hamster and two goldfish. He has no plans on leaving Scotland ever, though he does like to travel and top up his tan.

Wanted: CHRIS MORGAN (Screenplay by)

CHRIS MORGAN (Screenplay by) was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He started screenwriting in college and his first produced credit was 2004’s thriller Cellular, starring Kim Basinger. Morgan followed this up by penning Universal’s high-octane actioner The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

Morgan’s latest project, Universal’s Fast & Furious, reunites Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez and is currently shooting in Los Angeles.

Between keystrokes, Chris enjoys spending time with his two daughters, Maya and Chloe, and wife, Michelle.

Writers MICHAEL BRANDT & DEREK HAAS (Story by/Screenplay by)

Writers MICHAEL BRANDT & DEREK HAAS (Story by/Screenplay by) are the force behind such engaging, fast-paced, colorful screenplays as 2003’s blockbuster 2 Fast 2 Furious.

Most recently, Brandt and Haas wrote the remake 3:10 to Yuma, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. The film is about a battle of wills between a rancher and the outlaw he’s captured. Directed by James Mangold, the Lionsgate release opened no. 1 at the box office on September 7, 2007.

Brandt and Haas first met at Baylor University in 1989, where they attended both undergraduate and graduate school. At Baylor, Brandt received an MA in film and Haas graduated with an MA in English literature. The duo started writing screenplays together in the mid-1990s.

Their first produced work, Universal’s 2 Fast 2 Furious, has amassed more than $236 million in worldwide box office. Brandt and Haas followed up with the children’s film Catch That Kid for 20th Century Fox, starring Kristen Stewart and Corbin Bleu.

In addition to their thriving writing partnership, Brandt has recently been hired to direct his first feature film, Countdown (based on the Richard Matheson short story “Death Ship”), with Haas producing. Haas’ first novel, “The Silver Bear,” a thriller centered on the life of an assassin, will be published by Pegasus Books (distributed by Norton) in July of 2008.

Wanted: Kazakhstan-born writer/director TIMUR BEKMAMBETOV

Kazakhstan-born writer/director TIMUR BEKMAMBETOV (Directed by) co-wrote and directed the highest grossing film of all time in Russian cinema: 2006’s Day Watch, the follow-up to his explosive 2004 international hit Night Watch, the fantasy/ thriller he also wrote with Sergei Lukyanenko.

Before he became a filmmaker, Bekmambetov studied at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. He went on to graduate from the A.N. Ostrovsky Institute of Theatre Arts in Tashkent in 1987 with a degree in theater and cinema set designing.

After several years in the military, Bekmambetov began working in the field of advertising. For the next 15 years, he created and directed many award-winning television campaigns that would influence his distinct vision for film. Many of the ads received prizes and awards at both Russian and international festivals. In 2000, he became a member of the Russian Academy of Advertising.

Bekmambetov’s film career began in 1992, when he collaborated with Gennadi Kayumov to write and direct Peshavar Waltz. The film was awarded with prizes for both Best Director and Best Cast at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic.

In 1999, the filmmaker produced and directed an eight-part miniseries for television, Our ’90s. In 2000, he directed and co-produced (with Roger Corman) the feature The Arena. In 2002, Bekmambetov directed and co-produced (with Bakhyt Kilibayev) the film GAZ—Russian Cars.

Bekmambetov is currently producing the animated feature 9 for Focus Features. He also recently partnered with Universal to produce and distribute Russian-language feature films.

Wanted: stunt crew and others

Many of the stunts were shot at 150 frames per second, in quite super-slow motion. That meant that there was little for the cast members (stunt crew and others) to hide from the cameras. If a punch landed the wrong way or a fall looked awkward, it would have to be captured intact by Bekmambetov and DP Amundsen. Therefore, rehearsals would need to happen again and again…until each nuance was perfected.

One of Wanted’s signature sequences is a chase in which Fox scoops up Wesley in a red Viper and hurtles across the city to escape Cross’s pursuit via van. At the wheel of the Viper was Jolie as Fox. Stunt coordinator MIC RODGERS explains what was necessary to get the correct shots for his director (while Jolie hung on at 30 mph): “We rigged the viper for Angelina to hang off the side of it. She was in a harness, but we still spotted her. The camera was on the back of the Viper, where our camera platform is, and we chased it with the camera bike. Angelina as Fox did a head-on, near miss with an oncoming car, which throws her off to the driver’s side of the Viper. Then she shot the crap out of Cross’ truck.”

For some actors, however, it wasn’t so much the physicality of their roles that became a part of their characters, but their weapons. Supervising armorer RICHARD HOOPER had the task of introducing his guns to their new owners. He says, “We did some extensive training with the actors so they were all familiar with the weapons they used in the film. They were trained in two ways: the usual way in which anyone would use a weapon and in a specialist ‘Fraternity’ way that has evolved over the centuries, which enables the shooter to curve bullets around people and buildings so that they don’t kill anyone by mistake. Each member of the Fraternity has a unique way of firing specific to that character. All of the actors paid good attention to the instruction and safe use of the firearms.”

Thomas Kretschmann says, “The gun training was very tough for me. I was hired quite late in the game, so I was quite nervous about the fact that I didn’t have much time to train. I had no earthly idea how I was supposed to turn myself into the world’s greatest assassin in just one week. I felt like I needed at least six months to prepare. I want it to look good, and I’ll still be nervous about it at the time the movie opens.”

McAvoy was one of the first actors that Hooper had to train: “When we first meet Wesley, he knows nothing about guns, so we had to show a slightly clumsy, awkward and inexperienced character. In various stages of the training room, he starts to get better and better and eventually becomes the No. 1 top assassin.”

Portraying The Gunsmith, Common studied the arsenal of weaponry as part of his preparation. He explains, “I went through a process of learning different things about guns that I wasn’t familiar with. People always think of guns as something evil, but obviously, it’s what a person does with a gun that makes it either bad or good. The Gunsmith uses the gun as an art form and tool to perform the will of the Loom.”

The weaponry employed in Wanted is a combination of the very modern and very ancient—once again, echoing the overall design concept and grounding the story in a solid history. With it, the Fraternity carries centuries of customs, traditions, codes…and arms. There are approximately 200 various types of weaponry used in Wanted. As an ancient organization, the Fraternity has collected weapons throughout time, adopting a practice of adapting and modifying them, rather than replacing them. The process for developing these specialized props was a matter of design, redesign and then continuing with the evolution until they were finalized.

Hooper remarks, “Bekmambetov has a slightly curious view of this group of characters, and he likes to think outside the box. It was quite apparent from an early stage that he had a different take on what these guys could do, and he wanted the guns and knives to reflect that.”

Myhre adds, “Modern guns aren’t at all interesting to me, but Bekmambetov, with his fantastic way of thinking, started considering flintlocks [older gunlocks in which a flint strikes against steel to produce sparks that will ignite the priming on the piece], so we came up with the whole design concept of turning a flintlock into a semiautomatic weapon. We created a visual style and used it to adapt a lot of older weaponry—sort of like illuminating a manuscript. It was such an unusual style that we used it on the contemporary guns as well by carving into their barrels.”

Once the art department started developing these beautiful engravings on the guns, the suggestion was floated to continue the design of the firearm as a tattoo on a hand—so when a Fraternity member picks up his or her weapon, the engraving effectively continues as a tattoo. Hair and makeup designer Hannon says, “It was supposed to be a trademark of all of the Fraternity members, but at the end of the day, it was decided it would be best to keep this beautiful effect for one person…and that person was Fox.”

The paramount concern of any armorer is the safety of the actors and the crew. Not only do the performers have to learn how to use the guns and how to make their use look authentic—but also, they must be operated in a manner that ensures the safety of everyone involved. So it wasn’t just the principal actors who received firearm training, but also the crowd extras. Hooper comments, “We went to great lengths to make sure that every extra was trained for each sequence, each take, each piece of action. They were rehearsed and rehearsed so that everyone knew exactly what it was they had to do.”

So is there any possibility in modernizing ancient weapons or the physics of bending bullets around corners? Hooper laughs, “Oh, we’re just having fun. It’s pure fantasy, I’m afraid, but a bloody good one.”

Wanted: members of the Fraternity

In describing how the members of the Fraternity live their lives, you cannot overemphasize the importance of physical acumen. Their bodies are very much a part of their arsenal. Although the Fraternity of assassins are not superhuman, they do possess certain powers specific to their characters, which even the most regular gym-goer would be hard-pressed to mimic.

That necessitated quite a bit of physical training for the most active among the Fraternity, namely McAvoy and Jolie. McAvoy, in particular, had to do a convincing job of turning his body from that of a couch potato into a sleek, sinewy killer in record time.

Personal fitness trainer GLENN CHAPMAN, hired to ready the normally thin actor for his role as Wesley, explains: “The biggest challenge training McAvoy was the weight gain. I think he weighed around 62kg [137lbs] when we started training in London two months before the shoot, and we got him to 74kg [164lbs] at his heaviest point in Prague. The time we had to train was limited, and he needed bulk, so we did a combination of different types of training—sometimes weights, interval training and training at different speeds.”

Even after signing on, McAvoy was fairly unaware of the physical work ahead of him, and he confesses: “I’d rather eat dog poo than go to the gym. The training was a big change for me—sometimes my trainer pushed me so hard that I was on my knees wanting to be physically sick. He made me eat really, really horrible food at bad times of the day, but it seemed to do the trick. It gave Wes the body he needed.”

There was a dramatic change to McAvoy’s body shape in a short period of time. Although his training program was rigorous and intense, it was never the goal to give Wesley an overly bulky physique. McAvoy says, “We needed to keep Wesley as a character the audience could believe went from a convincing geek with small muscles, through this transformation, to someone who is bulkier…but not so big that you couldn’t hide it.”

McAvoy’s personal training underwent a necessary period of adjustment after he arrived for the shoot in Prague, as the sessions had to adapt around the shooting schedule. Fight training and kickboxing took away from his daily workouts, as he had to concentrate on learning the actual fight scenes for the film. McAvoy observes, “Size doesn’t necessarily equal power a lot of the time. That really helped me in this movie. It doesn’t really matter whether you look big or not; it’s whether you can make that jump or lift yourself with the force and power of your thigh. As soon as we started doing the action sequences and I didn’t have time to do my personal training at the end of the day, I could feel my muscles starting to disappear. My costumes felt a bit bigger on me than they did at the beginning of the shoot.”

For McAvoy, who is in almost every scene of the film, Wanted turned out to be the most physically demanding movie on which he had ever worked. Despite that, he still insisted on doing his own stunts. The stunt coordinators found the actor willing to give into the physical work the job required, with McAvoy often stepping in for his stunt double. He reasoned that the audience expects it.

Of his many manuevers, there was one that particularly pleased McAvoy: “My favorite stunt was jumping over the “L” train, which I did completely by myself. I had a stunt double, of course, who did the more dangerous things and makes me look incredibly good…but jumping over the bridge was all me and it was incredibly cool to do.”

His tutor would join him in much of the film’s action. “There’s one scene where my character, Fox, gets to beat up Wesley,” says Angelina Jolie. “All of the stunt team kept telling me that James has the qualities of a stuntman when it comes to taking a punch and throwing himself onto the floor—and they were right. He’s really great to work with. It’s always fun to do a scene where you get to jump around and punch people, but you don’t want to hit too hard, especially if you’re wearing brass knuckles. It can be funny or strange or even dangerous, but it really comes down to working with someone as good as McAvoy.”

Unfortunately for Wesley, it’s not only Fox who gets to subject him to a beating…so do fellow Fraternity brothers The Repairman (played by British actor MARC WARREN) and The Butcher (actor DATO BAKHTADZE).

Bakhtadze went through two weeks of harsh, strict stunt training for his knife fight with McAvoy. Bakhtadze says, “I arrived in Prague about two weeks before I was due to shoot, and that wasn’t a great deal of time for the fight coordinator to turn me into a killing machine! The stunt team helped me understand how to fight, not just with the weapon, but with emotion. It’s not all about the knife swing or knife swirl; it’s about what makes you want to do that move in the first place.”

Producer Marc Platt adds, “Our actors, all of them, loved doing stunts, particularly McAvoy and Jolie. There was a lot of training for this film, especially with McAvoy, whose character has to literally transform. You’ll be able to tell how much his training paid off in terms of making it a real and exciting experience for the audience.”

Wanted tells the story of an ordinary man who discovers this very different world

It might be said that creating a believable world that doesn’t really exist is the specialty of Timur Bekmambetov—although he would be quick to point out that that world might bear a slight resemblance to our own, but just tweaked, skewed and heightened.

Producer Marc Platt offers, “Hopefully, audiences will enjoy the film and be marvelously entertained, but also see something original. They should have a reason to go out to the movies on a Friday night—to experience a thrill ride with great characters all under the very sure and deft hand of a truly visionary filmmaker. And that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

Angelina Jolie comments, “I think what’s really cool is that with James as an action hero—he’s not an obvious action movie star—but with him, it will be nice for people in the audience to actually relate to him…like, ‘If that was me and I was working in my little cubicle and my life sucked, but I had skills and I didn’t know what I was worth…could I do that?’ James surprised me a lot. This movie will be more about Wesley’s story, as opposed to him being some ideal action hero. But James represents the everyman, and that is very, very cool to see.”

But how does the hero everyman feel? James McAvoy muses, “I don’t see myself doing another action movie for awhile. The 14-year-old boy in me was very excited about doing Wanted and I’m very appreciative of the opportunity to play Wesley but, to be bloody honest, I didn’t even have this much pain when I was 14. Maybe that’s why a 14-year-old boy would be keen to do this kind of thing, you know? I really have enjoyed it, though. It was just amazing.”

Timur Bekmambetov closes, “Wanted tells the story of an ordinary man who discovers this very different world…and all along this world was right next to him. Like in your neighborhood, but only two blocks away, and you never walked that way in all of your life. And one day, you walk differently and you find it. He just didn’t know it was there. And now that he’s there, what will he do?”

Universal Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment Present, In Association with Relativity Media, A Marc Platt/Kickstart Production, In Association with Top Cow: Wanted, starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp, Thomas Kretschmann, Common and Angelina Jolie. The music is by Danny Elfman. The costume designer is Varya Avdyushko. The film editor is David Brenner, ACE; the production designer is John Myhre; and the director of photography is Mitchell Amundsen. The executive producers are Adam Siegel, Marc Silvestri, Roger Birnbaum and Gary Barber. The film is produced by Marc Platt, Jim Lemley, Jason Netter and Iain Smith. Wanted is based on the series of comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones; the story is by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas; the screenplay is by Michael Brandt & Derek Haas and Chris Morgan. Wanted is directed by Timur Bekmambetov.

Wanted: Effects That Bend Bullets and Slow Time

Director Bekmambetov finds the idea of “fix it in post” a horrific concept—to him, visual effects are intended to take the shot further than captured in-camera, not to wholly create something that didn’t start on the set.

Bekmambetov explains, “For me, it is the emotion that is important, not really the effect. It may be a little old school, but this is how I get what I need from my actors and crew. I don’t use effects to make up for what is not there. If it’s in the character, in his or her emotions, it will be on the screen.”

Longtime collaborator/editor and second unit director of Wanted, DMITRI KISELEV, has worked with Bekmambetov in Russia for the last 10 years and is only just now starting to understand his friend’s vision. Kiselev describes, “Timur breaks so many rules, but he is always looking for something natural, something real in a shot before he even contemplates using CG to complete it. He will create his visual effects around an existing shot.”

Producer Lemley picks up: “When we were drafting the screenplay and developing the sequences, Bekmambetov would go away to his ‘science lab’ and come back with pre-visual sequences that illustrated exactly how he would shoot and what the focal point of each scene would be. That focus was always specific to the emotions we wanted the characters to convey and the impact those feelings would bring to the visual effects that completed the scene.”

Visual effects producer Farhat adds, “He uses his pre-vis as a tool—he uses it to educate and discuss with those who are trying to capture the action, but he doesn’t cripple people’s visions with it.

“There is no bad idea with Bekmambetov,” Farhat continues. “He knows there is more than one way to do something and he’s very open to ideas, but as experienced as he is, he understands that ideas always need to be fresh.”

The director has his own visual effects house in Moscow, Bazelevs (a production and postproduction/effects facility), which served as a “clearing house” for the effects created for Wanted. While not all of the effects were completed under its roof, Bazelevs maintained an overall watch on all out-of-house work.

Farhat says, “One of the biggest challenges making a film where you’re using multiple facilities is keeping the continuity, the look and the style consistent all across the board. Bazelevs works not only all over Russia, but the world. The visual effects were split up among various facilities—some worked on modeling, others created texturing, others animating and so forth. So Bazelevs created this digital pipeline, a digital asset management system, where they could actually follow the progression of any shot and compare it to the progression of any other shot in a sequence or anywhere else in the movie. The separate houses really acted as one house—a virtual company.”

One effect that stayed under the Bazelevs roof, however, was the creation of computer-generated stunt doubles. Even with Bekmambetov’s insistence on shooting as much of the story as can be captured in the real world, there were certain things (the height of assassin mode and high-risk action sequences such as running on the roofs of moving trains) that could not be filmed—even with the help of the best stunt performers and the most advanced wire works. To complete those scenes, digital stunt doubles were created through cyber-scanning.

Think of cyber-scanning as an enormous 3-D copy machine, which rotates around the actor (for around 15 seconds) and creates a 3-D model of that person. The model is transferred to the computer in a CG mold, which then has to be “rigged” (inserting skeletal and muscular systems and texturing the exterior) and fitted with wardrobe (which has also been scanned). That rig then has to be “taught” to replicate the way the actor—and the actual stunt double—move. The result is a digital double that doesn’t balk at engaging in the most life-threatening stunts imaginable.

In addition to high-end film cameras, Bekmambetov adapted a still technique for use in several sequences, particularly the “L” train chase. The director and cinematographer Admundsen employed a series of six synched 35mm cameras mounted on a special plate that could rotate 180°. The cameras’ lenses angled to capture the horizontal top of the train as it drives through Chicago and overlapped frames to produce a contiguous all-around view. When seamed all together and matched with green-screen shots of the actors, the result is a scene with a cylindrical or spherical texture and a complete 180° view of the nonstop action atop the speeding “L.”

Farhat concludes, “This technique really freed us up a lot. We’ve all seen tiled stills, where you take a series of stills and you match them end-to-end spherically, basically freezing the action and rotating the point-of-view. But in this case, we’re doing it with moving footage. I’d say it was one of the toughest sequences in the show, because we’re basically taking real actors and putting them in a world that doesn’t really exist.”

McAvoy and Bekmambetov spent a lot of time developing the actual on screen physical technique

Welcome to Assassin Mode

This is a trait shared by all in the Fraternity. It enables them to see things more clearly than a normal person. With the world at a snail’s pace, the assassin has more time in which to think, decide and act. While in the mode, the fighter can discern what is happening at any given moment with a jewel cutter’s precision—thus making life-altering decisions with ease and clarity.

The Assassin Mode was a complex notion to try to achieve visually, and Bekmambetov wanted it to work within the Wanted bounds he had established: that every effect needed to have an emotional basis. Ergo, if Wesley was to be in Assassin Mode, the director wanted the audience to be in Assassin Mode as well, not merely looking at it as an observer. And although all Fraternity members have the ability to go into the mode, the audience would only see it from Wes’ point of view.

McAvoy explains, “Within the mythology of the film, the senses of the assassins in the Fraternity become heightened as their hearts pump in excess of 400 beats-per-minute. They’re not supermen and they don’t have superpowers, but they see things faster and clearer—but making a decision that quickly, compared to everyone else around them, might be seen as something superhuman.”

Bekmambetov likes to push his boundaries—so how about defying the laws of physics? Why not? So he and DP Mitchell Amundsen fashioned a shot specific to the Fraternity that enabled them to bend bullets (again, to be augmented with visual effects).

McAvoy explains the concept behind the technique: “The Fraternity members can bend bullets because they have non-rifled chambers and barrels in their guns—non-rifled means there’s no interior grooving which causes the bullet to spiral as its fired. So, in our theory, that means that if I swing my wrist like I’m taking a tennis shot, the bullet arrives at your target but in a curved trajectory—not a straight shot. You can bend around objects. Instead of moving to get a target in sight, you just move your arm.”

McAvoy and Bekmambetov spent a lot of time developing the actual on screen physical technique that would “bend bullets.” Their goal was to create an action that looked “cool, but functional…seamless, rather than apparent.” Several crew (from both Team Amundsen and Team Farhat) were also involved in quite a bit of research to create a move that—in both camera effects and visual effects—would look completely possible and completely within the grasp of reality. (Of course, don’t ask a science professor or physics expert about the plausibility of this…)

Jolie comments, “I’m probably the only person that found the bending of bullets the most difficult thing to do in the movie. It’s a little odd to try and talk about it seriously, but when Morgan Freeman’s character is explaining how it works, and because it’s Morgan saying it, you actually start to believe it.”

Ultimately (and fully) dispelling the myth, McAvoy adds, “Oh, come on…It’s all made up, I’m afraid. Kids, don’t try this at home!”

Lots of Shooting: Bekmambetov Lenses Wanted

Another major factor in deciding to shoot in Prague was the availability of a panoply of architectural styles (from Beaux Arts to Communist Industrial) that could be utilized as locations. Such an array of structures could potentially offer up production-differing styles for each phase of the film (changing as Wes advances from the “real” world to the Fraternity world).

In addition to the dormant sugar factory, Prague provided such shooting sites as: the famous Strahov Stadium, the largest stadium in the world with seating for 220,000 spectators; Křivoklát Castle, 40km west of the city, begun in the 13th century and reborn several times (now standing thanks to a 19th-century restoration); and other, less distinctive locales (e.g., a disused practice train track, an old wine factory).

One of the most spectacular sequences—the train crash and subsequent tumble of cars into a gorge—was actually filmed in Romania. Locations supervisor Sharp comments, “I’ve researched gorges from Norway to Chile to see which would suit the film best, given the color and the scale. The color and the texture of the rock in the gorge and in the tunnel had to be stone specific to Europe. We needed to distinguish where we were to give us a sense of Wesley’s journey, to prove he’s moved on and to make all the other pieces fit.”

In order to anchor the story in Chicago, production moved from Prague (once principal photography had wrapped) to the Windy City, where exterior and action shots were filmed. Lensing with the main unit lasted two weeks, when the majority of the car chase sequences—Wes and Fox in a lightning-fast, red Viper versus police and other cars—were shot (and where production made use of the famous double-decker highway Wacker Drive, shooting on the ground level, or Lower Wacker). Images of Jolie, McAvoy and Kretschmann filming these car scenes were a regular feature on the local nightly news and splashed daily across the Internet.

Regardless of location, however, the view of the Wanted world is the same—usually through the eyes of Wesley. And that meant visually representing his thoughts, his feelings…and one particular problem.

In his former life, Wesley suffers, as many do, from anxiety and insecurity. This manifests itself to such an extreme that his heart races and he undergoes actual physical and physiological changes—he assumes all of this is due to a severe anxiety attack.

But after being reeled into the Fraternity by Fox, Wesley learns that this condition is actually genetic, passed on to him by his father…and it’s not a curse—it’s actually a gift. With his heart wildly beating, his system is flooded with a gargantuan amount of adrenalin, and as his inner world races, the outer world slows to a crawl.

Wanted: three-time Golden Globe winner ANGELINA JOLIE (Fox)

Academy Award® and three-time Golden Globe winner ANGELINA JOLIE (Fox) continues to be one of Hollywood’s most talented leading actresses. Jolie’s most recently released films were Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf and Michael Winterbottom’s critically acclaimed A Mighty Heart, the dramatic true story of Mariane and Daniel Pearl. Jolie’s performance in A Mighty Heart earned her nominations from the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild, Broadcast Film Critics and Film Independent’s Spirit Awards.

She recently completed filming Clint Eastwood’s Changeling and was heard as the voice of Tigress in DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda, opposite Jack Black. Upcoming films include the long-awaited adaptation of Ayn Rand’s seminal novel “Atlas Shrugged,” to be directed by Vadim Perelman.

Jolie’s previous films include The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and co-starring Matt Damon; Mr. & Mrs. Smith, co-starring Brad Pitt; Alexander, directed by Oliver Stone and co-starring Colin Farrell and Anthony Hopkins; and the action/adventure Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, with Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. She lent her voice to the animated feature Shark Tale, directed by the creators of Shrek, which also featured the voices of Will Smith, Robert De Niro and Jack Black. Jolie also starred in the Warner Bros. thriller Taking Lives, also with Ethan Hawke. In 2003, she played the lead role in the action/adventure Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, the sequel to the 2001 box-office smash Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and portrayed a relief worker for the United Nations in the provocative drama Beyond Borders.

In 2001, she starred in director Simon West’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Original Sin, opposite Antonio Banderas for Gia writer/director Michael Cristofer. The previous year, she was seen along with co-stars Nicolas Cage and Robert Duvall as car thieves committing their final heist in the smash hit Gone in Sixty Seconds for producer Jerry Bruckheimer. She was also in the romantic comedy Life or Something Like It. Jolie’s portrayal of a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted garnered her an Academy Award®, her third Golden Globe Award, a Broadcast Film Critics Award, ShoWest’s Supporting Actress of the Year Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress. The film, based on the true story by Susanna Kaysen, was directed by James Mangold and co-starred Winona Ryder.

Prior to that, she played a rookie police officer opposite Denzel Washington’s veteran detective in the thriller The Bone Collector, directed by Phillip Noyce. She also co-starred in Mike Newell’s Pushing Tin with Billy Bob Thornton and John Cusack. Playing by Heart earned her the National Board of Review’s award for Breakthrough Performance; this character-driven drama, directed by Willard Carroll, featured an all-star ensemble cast, including Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Madeleine Stowe, Ellen Burstyn, Gillian Anderson and Dennis Quaid.

The HBO film Gia earned Jolie critical praise as well as a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of supermodel Gia Carangi, who died of AIDS. Jolie also received an Emmy nomination for her role opposite Gary Sinise in director John Frankenheimer’s George Wallace, a period epic for TNT about the controversial governor from Alabama. The film earned Jolie her first Golden Globe Award and a CableACE nomination for her portrayal of George Wallace’s second wife, Cornelia.

Jolie also co-starred with David Duchovny and Timothy Hutton in director Andy Wilson’s Playing God. Prior to that, she starred in Hallmark Hall of Fame’s four-hour miniseries presentation True Women; directed by Karen Arthur, it was based on Janice Woods Windle’s best-selling historical novel. Jolie also starred in Annette Haywood-Carter’s much-acclaimed Foxfire and Iain Softley’s Hackers.

A member of the famed MET Theatre Ensemble Workshop, Jolie trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and has also studied with Jan Tarrant in New York and Silvana Gallardo in Los Angeles.

Jolie has also received wide recognition for her humanitarian work. She was the first recipient of the Citizen of the World Award from the United Nations Correspondents Association, as well as the Global Humanitarian Award in 2005. In February 2007, Jolie was accepted by the bipartisan think tank Council on Foreign Relations for a special five-year term designed to nurture the next generation of foreign policy makers.

Jolie is also a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She helped push through the Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection Act and founded the National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children, an organization that provides free legal aid to asylum-seeking children.

Wanted: Grammy Award-winning artist COMMON (The Gunsmith)

In 2006, the Grammy Award-winning artist COMMON (The Gunsmith) made his big screen debut as a musical performer in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. In January 2007, he made his acting debut co-starring opposite Jeremy Piven, Ben Affleck, Alicia Keys and Ryan Reynolds in Smokin’ Aces for Universal Pictures and writer/director Joe Carnahan. In November 2007, he co-starred opposite Denzel Washington in American Gangster, directed by Ridley Scott. His most recent motion picture work was seen in David Ayer’s Street Kings, starring Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker.

Prior to acting, Common rose to prominence as one of hip-hop’s most poetic and respected lyricists, having recorded more than six albums: “Can I Borrow a Dollar?,” “Resurrection,” “One Day It’ll All Make Sense,” “Like Water for Chocolate” and “Electric Circus.” In 2004, he partnered with Chicago native and rap music megastar Kanye West to produce “Be,” which went on to garner four Grammy Award nominations. In July 2006, his video for the single “Testify” was nominated for two MTV Video Music Awards, including Best Hip-Hop Video.

On July 31, 2007, Common released his critically acclaimed seventh album, “Finding Forever;” it debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200 Album Chart and went on to earn a Grammy. He’s recently wrapped production on his latest album, “Invincible Summer,” slated for a June 2008 release date.

In the last year, Common’s launched his Soji hat line and the Common Ground Foundation, which gives back and allows our youth to realize their full potential. The Foundation is dedicated to the empowerment and development of urban youth in the United States.

Additionally, Common offers a younger generation a better understanding of self-respect and love, using the cultural relevance of hip-hop in the children’s books he has written. The first one, titled “The Mirror and Me,” teaches lessons of life, the human spirit and human nature. His follow-up book, “I Like You but I Love Me,” was nominated for an NAACP Image Award; his third book, “M.E. (Mixed Emotions),” was recently released.

Wanted: JAMES McAVOY (Wesley Gibson)

JAMES McAVOY (Wesley Gibson) was born in the Scotstoun area of Glasgow, Scotland, in 1979 and is a graduate of the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. In his short career, he has tested himself with a wide variety of work, on stage, television and film, and is regarded as one of the U.K.’s most exciting acting talents.

Although he cut his teeth with small parts in high-profile projects like the World War I drama Regeneration (alongside Jonathan Pryce and Dougray Scott) and the hugely successful HBO series Band of Brothers (produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg), McAvoy first came to prominence in the U.K. with the role of Josh in the Channel 4 adaptation of Zadie Smith’s popular novel “White Teeth,” with Geraldine James, John Simm and Naomie Harris. This brought McAvoy to the attention of Hollywood and, in 2002, he was cast as Leto Atreides II in the Emmy Award-winning massive hit miniseries Children of Dune, directed by Greg Yaitanes and co-starring Susan Sarandon and Steven Berkoff.

As McAvoy’s body of work grew, the roles being offered to him grew more and more significant, and he soon found himself playing the role of Dan Foster in the BAFTA-winning BBC One political-drama series State of Play, with Bill Nighy, John Simm and Kelly Macdonald. Written by Paul Abbott and directed by David Yates, the series ran in the U.K. in autumn 2003 and on BBC America in 2004 and became one of the most successful U.K. television exports of recent years.

While impressing on the small screen, McAvoy also proved to be a hit on the big screen, when Stephen Fry’s much anticipated comedy Bright Young Things was released in October 2004. The film had an all-star international cast, including Emily Mortimer, Dan Aykroyd, Peter O’Toole, Jim Broadbent, Richard E. Grant and many more. Bright Young Things was released in the U.S. in August 2005.

McAvoy’s popularity in the U.K. grew with his portrayal of the car thief Steve in the BAFTA-winning Channel 4 series Shameless, which began in the U.K. in early 2004. Once again written by Paul Abbott, the series tells the story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a family living on a Manchester council estate. McAvoy was nominated in the Best Comedy Newcomer category at the 2004 British Comedy Awards for his performance.

In 2004, McAvoy took his first feature film lead role in Inside I’m Dancing (U.S. title: Rory O’Shea Was Here). Directed by Damien O’Donnell and co-starring Romola Garai, the film tells the story of Rory, a young Irishman with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, who leads his cerebral palsy-stricken friend in a fight for physical and emotional freedom. The film received great critical acclaim, with McAvoy’s performance being especially noted; he received a nomination in the British Actor of the Year category at the 2005 London Film Critics’ Circle Awards. The film was released in the United States in February 2005.

December of 2005 saw the long-awaited arrival of Disney’s big-budget The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, filmed in New Zealand over the second half of 2004. McAvoy played Mr. Tumnus the Faun in this adaptation of the C.S. Lewis classic, directed by Andrew Adamson and co-starring Tilda Swinton. The film became a massive international success and is one of the 20 highest grossing films of all time. McAvoy won the Rising Star Award at the 2006 BAFTAs, and he was nominated in the British Actor of the Year in a Supporting Role at the 2006 London Film Critics’ Circle Awards for his performance.

In the summer of 2005, James traveled to Uganda to take on the lead role in The Last King of Scotland, directed by the Oscar®- and BAFTA-winning Kevin Macdonald. The film tells the story of Nicholas Garrigan, a Scottish doctor on a Ugandan medical mission, who becomes irreversibly entangled with one of the world’s most barbaric figures, Idi Amin, played by Forest Whitaker. McAvoy was nominated for a BAFTA, a European Film Award, a BIFA and a London Film Critic’s Circle Award for his performance.

Upon returning to the U.K., McAvoy started work on his lead role in the adaptation of the hugely popular David Nicholls book, “Starter for 10,” for HBO Films. The film was directed by Tom Vaughan and produced by Tom Hanks; McAvoy’s co-stars included Alice Eve, Rebecca Hall, Benedict Cumberbatch and Catherine Tate. The film was released in the U.K .in October 2006 and premiered at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival before a February 2007 U.S. release.

The actor’s next project was Penelope, directed by Mark Palansky and co-starring Reese Witherspoon, Christina Ricci and Richard E. Grant. McAvoy played a man called upon to save a young woman cursed with the snout of a pig. Penelope began filming in London in February 2006 and premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival ahead of a February 2008 U.S. release.

In April 2006, the ever-busy McAvoy moved to Dublin to start work on Becoming Jane, directed by Julian Jarrold and co-starring Dame Maggie Smith and Julie Walters. McAvoy played the brilliant and roguish Irishman Tom Lefroy, whose affair with Jane Austen (Anne Hathaway) inspired her to write “Pride and Prejudice.” The film was released in the U.K. in March 2007 and in the U.S. in August 2007.

From Dublin, McAvoy returned immediately to the U.K. to begin work on Atonement. An adaptation of the popular Ian McEwan novel, the movie is directed by Joe Wright and co-stars Keira Knightley, Brenda Blethyn and Romola Garai. McAvoy played Robbie Turner, a Cambridge graduate falsely accused of rape, who goes on to fight in World War II with the accusation hanging over him. Atonement had its world premiere at the 2007 Venice Film Festival ahead of the September 2007 U.K. and December 2007 U.S. releases. McAvoy received Golden Globe and BAFTA Best Actor nominations and won awards from the London Film Critics’ Circle, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and the U.K. Regional Critics for the role.

In April 2008 James moved to Germany to begin filming The Last Station, a historical drama that illustrates Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s struggle to balance fame and wealth with his commitment to a life devoid of material things; the film is directed by Michael Hoffman.

Wanted: THOMAS KRETSCHMANN (Cross)

THOMAS KRETSCHMANN (Cross) was born in a no-man’s-land—a piece of land that has switched hands over the last 50 years…first Germany, then Poland, then Russia. In East Germany, where he trained as a teen to be an Olympic swimmer, he set numerous international swimming records, but instead he decided to pursue an acting career. At 20 years old, he was able to escape by foot through Hungary, Yugoslavia and Austria to West Berlin to begin a new life without the regimentation of communism—where he received political asylum. After three years of odd jobs and acting classes, he was invited to be a member of the Schillertheater (Germany’s equivalent of England’s Royal Shakespeare Company).

In 1991, he made his film debut in Der Mitwisser, which earned him Germany’s prestigious Max Ophüls Prize as Best Up-and-Coming Actor for his performance. When he appeared in the World War II epic Stalingrad (made by the producers of Das Boot), his performance launched him into the international limelight. He went on to star in Queen Margot, Marching in Darkness, Dario Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome and Prince Valiant, to name a few of his more internationally known credits. American audiences were introduced to Kretschmann in Universal’s U-571, directed by Jonathan Mostow. He then went on to star in Blade II, directed by Guillermo del Toro. He starred opposite Adrien Brody in the Oscar®-winning film The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski. Peter Jackson’s King Kong followed, as well as Lee Tamahori’s Next.

Although Kretschmann has done limited television work, he did portray the title role in the telefilm Have No Fear: The Life of Pope John Paul II.

Kretschmann will next be seen in The Young Victoria, opposite Emily Blunt. He just wrapped shooting in Germany in the upcoming Tom Cruise film Valkyrie.

Kretschmann makes his home in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.

Wanted: TERENCE STAMP (Pekwarsky)

TERENCE STAMP (Pekwarsky) was born in Bow, London. His motion picture debut was in Peter Ustinov’s 1962 film adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.” Stamp’s portrayal of the title character brought him not only an Academy Award® nomination, but also international attention.

After his success in Billy Budd, Stamp collaborated with some of the cinema’s most revered filmmakers. He starred in William Wyler’s adaptation of John Fowles’ “The Collector,” opposite Samantha Eggar, and in Modesty Blaise for director Joseph Losey and producer Joe Janni. Stamp reteamed with producer Janni for two more projects: John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s “Far from the Madding Crowd,” starring Julie Christie, and Ken Loach’s first feature film, Poor Cow.

Stamp then journeyed to Italy to star in Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit, a 50-minute portion of the Edgar Allan Poe film adaptation titled Spirits of the Dead. Stamp made Italy his home for several years, during which time his film work included Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, opposite Silvana Mangano.

His subsequent film credits include Alan Cooke’s The Mind of Mr. Soames; Richard Donner’s Superman and Richard Lester’s Superman II (as Kryptonian super villain General Zod); Peter Brook’s Meetings With Remarkable Men; Stephen Frears’ The Hit; Richard Franklin’s Link; Ivan Reitman’s Legal Eagles; Michael Cimino’s The Sicilian; and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. The film Prince of Shadows, in which the actor starred for director Pilar Miró, was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Stamp began his fourth decade as an actor, wearing some of the choicest of Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel’s Academy Award®-winning costumes, for the comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, starring with Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving for director Stephan Elliott.

In 1999, it was Stamp’s lead role in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (which debuted that year to widespread critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival) that once again made him popular to a whole new generation of moviegoers. For his performance, Stamp received nominations for Best Male Lead at the 2000 Independent Spirit Awards and for Best British Actor at the London Film Critics’ Circle (ALFS) Awards.

Stamp can also be seen in George Lucas’ global blockbuster Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace; Frank Oz’s Bowfinger, opposite Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy; Red Planet, opposite Val Kilmer; the French romantic comedy My Wife Is an Actress, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg; My Boss’s Daughter, opposite Ashton Kutcher; Disney’s The Haunted Mansion, playing the diabolical butler Ramsley, opposite Eddie Murphy; and Elektra, playing Elektra’s blind master Stick, opposite Jennifer Garner in the title role.

In 2008, Stamp will be seen in the Warner Bros. feature film remake of the famous television series Get Smart, playing Siegfried, spokesman for the infamous KAOS organization, opposite Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway. In 2009, Stamp will also star opposite Tom Cruise in Valkyrie for director Bryan Singer. The film is based on a real-life plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Stamp recently wrapped production on Yes Man, playing opposite Jim Carrey; also for Warner Bros., the film is due out later this year.

In addition to his acting career, Stamp is an accomplished writer and author. He has published three volumes of his memoirs, including “Stamp Album” (written in tribute to his late mother), a novel titled “The Night” and a cookbook co-written with Elizabeth Buxton to provide alternatives to those who are wheat and dairy-intolerant.

Wanted: MORGAN FREEMAN (Sloan) won an Academy Award in 2005

MORGAN FREEMAN (Sloan) won an Academy Award® in 2005 for his supporting role in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. Freeman is also the recipient of three additional Oscar® nominations, the first in 1987 for his chilling performance as a homicidal pimp in the drama Street Smart, which also brought him Los Angeles Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics awards for Best Supporting Actor, as well as an Independent Spirit Award and a Golden Globe nomination. He earned his second Oscar® nomination in 1989 for re-creating his award-winning Broadway role in Driving Miss Daisy and his third for Frank Darabont’s 1994 drama The Shawshank Redemption.

Freeman’s recent film credits include Luc Besson’s Unleashed; Robert Redford’s An Unfinished Life; Batman Begins; Lucky Number Slevin; the comedy Bruce Almighty and its sequel, Evan Almighty; Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone; Robert Benton’s Feast of Love; the Academy Award®-winning documentary March of the Penguins, for which he provided the narration; and Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List.

Among his upcoming projects are the next chapter in the Batman saga, The Dark Knight, and the crime drama The Code, both set for a 2008 release.

The Memphis-born actor began his career on New York stages in the early 1960s, following a stint as a mechanic in the air force. A decade later, he became a nationally known television personality when he created the popular character Easy Reader on the popular children’s show The Electric Company. Throughout the 1970s, he continued his work on stage, winning the Drama Desk Award and the Clarence Derwent Award and receiving a Tony nomination for his outstanding performance in The Mighty Gents in 1978. He also won an Obie Award for his portrayal of Shakespearean antihero Coriolanus at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

In 1984, Freeman won another Obie for his role as The Messenger in the acclaimed Brooklyn Academy of Music production of Lee Breuer’s The Gospel at Colonus and, in 1985, he won the Drama-Logue Award for the same role. The part of Hoke Colburn in Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Driving Miss Daisy, brought him a third Obie. His last stage appearance was as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Delacorte Theater with Tracey Ullman.

In 1993, Freeman made his film directorial debut with Bopha! and soon after formed Revelations Entertainment to develop entertainment products that enlighten, inspire and glorify the human experience. Its most recent production was the Brad Silberling comedy 10 Items or Less, in which Freeman starred with Paz Vega.

Freeman’s earlier acting credits also include roles in Brubaker, Harry & Son, Teachers, Marie, That Was Then…This Is Now, Clean and Sober, Johnny Handsome, the multiple award-winning Glory, Chain Reaction, Kiss the Girls, Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, Hard Rain, Deep Impact, Nurse Betty, Along Came a Spider, High Crimes and The Sum of All Fears.

What happens in Vegas would quickly land in front of the cameras

From the first roll of the dice, the odds were good that What Happens in Vegas would quickly land in front of the cameras. On the strength of a winning pitch by screenwriter Dana Fox and producer Michael Aguilar, the studio immediately commissioned a script and the comedy was off and running.

Recalls Aguilar, "We sold the pitch in the spring, Dana delivered the first draft in the fall, Cameron [Diaz] and Ashton [Kutcher] soon became attached based on that draft, and we were shooting the following summer. By Hollywood standards, that's pretty much warp speed."

According to Dana Fox, What Happens in Vegas was actually an amalgam of several movie ideas she'd been working on. "I'm really interested in stories about finding love or getting to know someone through dysfunction or adversity. I first came up with this story about two people who strangely get to know each other while divorcing. Around that time, I kept hearing the phrase 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas' and thought, if it wasn't already taken, it would make a great title for a film.

"Then, out of nowhere, Britney Spears goes and gets married in Las Vegas. And, it's like, yeah--one of the things you can do in Vegas is get married on a whim, sometimes even to a total stranger. Of course, the other thing you can do there is win a ton of money. And then it hit me: what if both of those things happened on the same night?" And, thus, What Happens in Vegas was born.

Cameron Diaz thinks the film's title evokes quite the vivid scenario. "Vegas is a 24-hour city," she says, "you can't tell what time it is, you don't know how much money you've spent, how much you've drunk, how much you've slept, and so on. There's kind of a built in safety net, though--because anything is possible in Vegas, you're given the permission to basically do anything there that you'd probably never do anyplace else at any other time in your life."

"It's really like a free pass to be your wildest, craziest, funniest self," declares Ashton Kutcher, "because no one's supposed to ever find out what you do there."
Diaz and Kutcher were both excited by the chance to bring the film's kicky "what if" scenario to life. "I loved the script's 'grass is always greener' theme," confirms Diaz. "People in relationships often think their single friends are the lucky ones, while the singles just want to be in a relationship. In life, it's ultimately about finding your own happiness. It's not enough to be happy just because you're in a relationship; first you need to be happy with yourself. That's something I think my character Joy learns the hard way."

"Jack and Joy are kind of flip sides of the same coin," Kutcher asserts. "They're both relationship challenged, even though Jack's pretty relaxed about it all while Joy's more uptight. Romantically, they've both been looking for the wrong thing, which is probably what draws them to each other to begin with--even if they are really, really hammered at the time."

Director Tom Vaughan (Starter for 10) was taken with Fox's script after reading just the first act. "The story setup is so incredibly dynamic, fast-paced, and inventive, it absolutely had me hooked by page 30 or 40," reflects Vaughan. "It's a classic sparring comedy with two characters who, deep down, are wildly drawn to each other, though of course they can't see it.

"This kind of dynamic has been going on in movies since Cary Grant first laid eyes on Katharine Hepburn--and well before that. Basically, you put together two fantastic, attractive movie stars in a small, confined space, and let them fight it out until they realize what their relationship is all about. And, as always, it's how they get there that's the real fun."

Though the movie's concept had its share of broad and funny conceits, the filmmakers worked hard to ground the story in as much reality as possible, especially when it came to the legal aspects of the main characters' marriage and divorce. "We set the movie in New York because that state's divorce laws jibed with the story we ultimately wanted to tell," relates producer Aguilar. "It was also the perfect place to set the non-Vegas parts of the film."

Concurs Dana Fox, "Tonally, we could get away with being a bit 'larger than life' because we always kept the emotional truth of the situations and the characters in the forefront."

Once Vaughan became involved, he also recognized the need to keep the film's humor in balance. "I wanted the comedy to be very strong and genuinely funny, but also for audiences to care about Jack and Joy's relationship. I tried to avoid doing anything too extreme just to get a laugh."

"Sure, I have to flash a cabbie, race down the streets of New York throwing mangoes, and wrestle Ashton to the ground in the middle of Central Park, but there's an honest method to my madness," assures Cameron Diaz. "Tom made sure we stayed real in what were some very surreal situations."

"As someone who will do anything for a laugh, I appreciated Tom's vigilance in not allowing us to go insane just for the sake of, say, a great bit for the trailer," says Ashton Kutcher. "At the same time, I knew, given the script's wild premise, we'd have our share of creative freedom."

With such starry leads as Kutcher and Diaz on board from the start, there was a sure-fire foundation in place that couldn't help but excite everyone involved. Vaughan considers the Kutcher-Diaz pairing "a fantastic piece of casting." He remembers, "The minute I heard they were attached, it just made the most sense in the world. I thought, 'Cameron and Ashton in a movie together? Why did nobody do this before?'" The director affirms, "From day one, there was never any question that they weren't going to have fantastic chemistry."

"I knew both Ashton and Cameron were incredibly funny," says Dana Fox, "but I was really impressed by the immense amount of heart and depth they brought to their roles. Because they're both so bright, we were able to turn this movie into something smarter than your average trip-and-fall romantic comedy."

"I think I do, actually, trip and fall a few times in the movie," jokes Cameron Diaz.

"That's because I probably pushed you," quips Kutcher.

What happens in Vegas, career woman Joy McNally (Cameron Diaz) and playboy Jack Fuller (Ashton Kutcher

During a wild vacation in Las Vegas, career woman Joy McNally (Cameron Diaz) and playboy Jack Fuller (Ashton Kutcher) come to the sober realization that they have married each other after a night of drunken abandon. Not only that, but there is huge jackpot at stake. When an implacable judge freezes the prize money and refuses to grant an annulment, Joy and Jack are forced to try to make their impromptu marriage work.

The popular expression, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" conjures up a veritable jackpot of shed inhibitions, insane indulgence, and gleeful debauchery. And if you can remember any of it, you probably weren't there.

But what would happen if a few crazy--okay, hugely inebriated--moments in Sin City not only didn't "stay" there but also followed you all the way back home and threatened to turn your life upside down? That's the setup that explodes into a series of outrageous consequences for two sexy, if wildly mismatched, strangers in the comedy What Happens in Vegas.

For charismatic party guy Jack Fuller (ASHTON KUTCHER) and buttoned-up commodities trader Joy McNally (CAMERON DIAZ), a rowdy weekend coincidentally shared in Las Vegas should have, by all rights, ended up being little more than a random blur. That is, if these two vacationing New Yorkers didn't have a signed marriage license staring them in the face to shockingly remind them of the giant misstep they took while feeling no pain, Vegas-style.
Stacking the deck, not only did Jack and Joy tie the knot after tying one on, but later scored a mind-blowing three million bucks in a slot machine bonanza. Well, Jack won it with Joy's quarter. At the machine she'd already been playing. Or was it the other way around? And whose loot is it anyway?
Therein lies the weird hand dealt this bickering duo who take their predicament back to Manhattan only to be sentenced by the intractable Judge Whopper (DENNIS MILLER) to "six months hard marriage." Despite the hapless protests of Jack's best friend and legal counsel Steve "Hater" Hader (ROB CORDDRY), Whopper refuses to grant Jack and Joy an annulment, freezes the prize booty, and forces the irresponsible couple to prove they have done everything humanly possible to make their impromptu marriage work. This includes co-habitation, weekly counseling sessions, and doing something the old school Whopper believes Jack and Joy's "generation" hates to do: try. Otherwise, the judge guarantees, the three million bucks will stay caught up in a legal battle so long and expensive no one but the lawyers will ever see a penny of it.
I now pronounce you man and wife. For real.
Jack and Joy figure, "Fine, how hard can it be" and take the bait only to find themselves locked in a hilarious, patience-testing, panties-twisting game of wild one-upmanship--may the best "pretend spouse" win.

The battle of the sexes has never had a pair of gladiators like Jack and Joy, not to mention their partners in crime--Jack's hair-trigger buddy "Hater" and Joy's take-no-prisoners gal pal Tipper (LAKE BELL), who despise each other with almost as much venom as do Jack and Joy. Throw in Jack's demanding father, Jack, Sr. (TREAT WILLIAMS); Joy's hard-driving boss, Banger (DENNIS FARINA); her snooty ex-fiance, Mason (JASON SUDEIKIS); and a savvy shrink named Dr. Twitchell (QUEEN LATIFAH), and pretty soon there's a whole team of folks making Jack and Joy's frantic charade that much crazier.

Can Jack and Joy survive their six months of "wedded bliss"--without killing each other first--and ultimately cash in for the big payoff? Or will the fiery sparks that ricochet between them actually ignite, turning a fake relationship into something astonishingly real?

In the end, what happens in What Happens in Vegas may prove the biggest surprise of all.

What happens in Vegas The filmmakers use the city to show the differences between the main characters

The lead casting was a bit tricky in one sense, though, since, for most of the movie, their characters, Jack and Joy, have to hate each other. "The story forces them into that position," notes Tom Vaughan, "but it's important that you always know deep down they're right for each other. With these particular movie stars, they look and feel right together on screen, so hopefully, it makes for a convincing core relationship for the entire film."

With the magnetic Kutcher and Diaz toplining, the bar was set unusually high for casting the film's supporting roles. "We wanted to surround Cameron and Ashton with really smart comedians, actors with original comedy voices," recounts producer Aguilar. "For example, Rob Corddry, who I'd worked with on a few other films, is a brilliant comic actor, as is Zach Galifianakis. They were the perfect choices to play Jack's buddies since we weren't looking for traditional 'best friend' characters--that is, guys who just stand around making wisecracks. We wanted them to be fully fleshed out by actors who could bring a unique comic timing and sensibility to their performances."

Adds Aguilar: "The same is true of Jason Sudeikis, who plays Joy's fiancé Mason. Jason was, maybe, a different way to go for the part, in that you don't automatically picture him as a traditional Wall Street guy. But he's so smart and talented and handsome that, once he puts on that power suit, you totally buy him in the role. With Jason, you also never risk losing the humor because he's so genuinely funny."

Cutting-edge comedian and talk show host Dennis Miller was also not necessarily "type casting" for Judge Whopper, the curmudgeonly legal veteran who presides over Jack and Joy's would-be divorce. Says Aguilar: "Though Dennis might be a bit younger and wryer than your traditional judge, we wanted someone who could play Whopper seriously, yet also make you think he might be a little, well, crazy. Dennis accomplished both goals, plus added his own inimitable stamp to the character."

Lake Bell, who plays Joy's funny-angry friend Tipper, also brought a distinctive comic approach to her role. "Lake brings this almost masculine energy to the part," says Dana Fox, "but manages to keep it sexy and fun and flirty, which is a really hard combination to bring to the table."

"I love people who speak their minds, and that's my favorite thing about both of the 'best friend' characters, Tipper and 'Hater' [Rob Corddry]," adds Fox. "I think there's nothing funnier than the truth uttered at a really inappropriate moment and Lake and Rob just play that note so well. Also, considering 'Hater' is such a misanthrope, Rob brought a sweetness and innocence to the part that made the guy incredibly likable."

"The movie was filled with so much amazing comedic talent, it brought everybody's game up that much higher," confirms Cameron Diaz. "It was a totally electric work environment."

Although the movie has 'Vegas' in its title, most of it takes place in New York, which inspired director Vaughan to treat the celebrated city like it was another character in the film. "We managed to get some spectacular backdrops to shoot against, which also helps give the movie an authentic energy as well as its own specific look," says Vaughan.

The filmmakers also use the city to show the differences between the main characters. Says Aguilar: "Joy works on Wall Street and has a faster, more upscale life, while Jack resides in Brooklyn and builds closets for a living. With such a varied pair, we were able to showcase the beauty and uniqueness of New York in so many interesting, contrasting ways. It basically doubled our possibilities."
A madcap cross-town chase scene in which Jack and Joy race, separately, to make a mandatory appointment with their marriage therapist -- each attempting to thwart the other's journey -- was the film's most complex set piece. Vaughan storyboarded every shot, ensuring that the sequence's inherent sense of fun and spontaneity was fully captured.

Filming concluded with two weeks on location in Las Vegas, with the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino serving as "home base." Shooting a movie anywhere crowded can cause a commotion, but filming in Las Vegas can be more than challenging. "Picture trying to shoot a scene with stars as big as Ashton and Cameron," says Aguilar. "The city isn't going to block off an area that huge and popular, so you just have to go with it. You end up with a ton of people walking by, watching, and shouting to the actors. It's tough, but you find ways to work with the environment, not against it."
Vaughan wanted the shoot to finish in Las Vegas, thinking it would be "a psychologically nice, morale-boosting place to end up." On a more practical note, it also worked better to film first in New York, during the summer, when the city's visual landscape and light were at their peak. "The Vegas scenes were mostly interiors and night shots," explains Vaughan, "so it worked out fine to wait and shoot there in the fall."

In the end, not only does Vaughan hope audiences walk away from What Happens in Vegas having had a joyful, entertaining movie experience, but also with a better understanding of what brings people together. "Sometimes the person you're meant to be with is right in front of you," maintains Vaughan. "You just have to give yourself a chance to realize you've actually found them."
"That's the cool thing about life," offers Ashton Kutcher, "you can never predict who you'll end up with or why. But when it happens, you have to pay attention. Like they say, there are no accidents."

Adds Cameron Diaz: "Most of the great decisions that will ever be made are the illogical ones. And sometimes those are the choices that work out the best for us."

CAMERON DIAZ is a four-time Golden Globe nominee

CAMERON DIAZ (Joy McNally) is a four-time Golden Globe® nominee and one of contemporary Hollywood's most popular screen actresses. After making a major impression debuting opposite Jim Carrey in the action-comedy The Mask, Diaz was seen in a string of well-regarded independent films including The Last Supper; Ed Burns' She's the One; Feeling Minnesota, with Keanu Reeves; Head above Water; Keys to Tulsa; and Danny Boyle's A Life Less Ordinary, co-starring Ewan McGregor.

Then, in 1997, the actress achieved bona fide star status when she appeared along with Julia Roberts and Dermot Mulroney in the hugely successful romantic comedy My Best Friend's Wedding playing the beautiful, vulnerable, and vocally challenged Kimberly.

Fortune shined on Diaz again the next year when she starred as the object of both Ben Stiller's and Matt Dillon's wacky affections in the Farrelly Brothers' surprise hit There's Something About Mary. The edgy comedy earned Diaz her first Golden Globe Award nomination, for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical.

After a role in the thriller Very Bad Things, she went on to co-star with John Cusack in the boldly original Being John Malkovich. For her transformative role as the dowdy, pet-obsessed Lotte Schwartz, Diaz received her second Golden Globe nomination, this time in the Best Supporting Actress category.

The next few years marked a series of major milestones for the actress when she appeared in the enormously popular Charlie's Angels feature remake; as the voice of Princess Fiona in the animated mega-smash Shrek; in Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky, opposite Tom Cruise; and in Martin Scorcese's lauded epic, Gangs of New York. The latter two roles earned Diaz her third and fourth Golden Globe Award nominations.

Other big-screen appearances during this time included Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, The Invisible Circus, and The Sweetest Thing.

The sequels Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Shrek 2, and Shrek the Third followed for Diaz, along with lead roles in Curtis Hanson's In Her Shoes and Nancy Meyers' The Holiday.

The actress will next be seen in Richard Kelly's sci-fi thriller The Box, with Shrek Goes Fourth currently slated for release in 2010.

ASHTON KUTCHER has become one of the most in-demand leading men on the big screen

ASHTON KUTCHER (Jack Fuller) has become one of the most in-demand leading men on the big screen. It all started on the small-screen, though, for the former Calvin Klein model when he was cast in the hit Fox TV series That '70s Show as the dim-witted, but sexy, Michael Kelso. Kutcher appeared in 183 episodes of the sitcom from its debut in 1998 through 2006.

At the same time, he acted in numerous features including Dude, Where's My Car; Just Married; Cheaper By the Dozen; The Butterfly Effect; Guess Who; A Lot Like Love; and Bobby, establishing himself as a reliable presence in both broad comedies and romantic comedies, as well as in dramas.

Most recently, Kutcher co-starred with Kevin Costner in The Guardian and voiced the role of the fast-talking mule deer Elliot in the animated hit Open Season.

Kutcher, through his production company Katalyst Films, has also enjoyed a successful television-producing career, starting with MTV's popular hidden camera reality series Punk'd, which he hosted as well. Kutcher went on to executive produce a succession of other reality shows including the CW's Beauty and the Geek, which is currently entering its fifth season; NBC's The Real Wedding Crashers; and, for MTV, Room 401 and Adventures in Hollywood, featuring rap group Three 6 Mafia. He also produced the recent ABC sitcom Miss/Guided and has several game shows airing soon including Game Show in my Head for CBS and Opportunity Knocks for ABC.

Kutcher will be seen later this year, along with Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates, in the feature drama Personal Effects, and in Spread, co-starring Anne Heche, produced by Kutcher and his Katalyst films.

ROB CORDDRY appeared in the indie farce The Ten, along with such major studio comedies as Blades of Glory, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

ROB CORDDRY (Steve "Hater" Hader) first gained attention through his appearances on Comedy Central's sketch comedy series Upright Citizens' Brigade and, later, as a longtime "correspondent" for the network's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Comic roles in films like Old School and Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story and such TV series as Arrested Development, Cartoon Network's Sunday Pants, and Curb Your Enthusiasm followed for the Boston native.

Corddry went on to act in the features Failure to Launch, The Pleasure of Your Company, and Unaccompanied Minors, and lent his voice to the animated Arthur and the Invisibles.

Last year, in addition to starring in the short-lived Fox TV series The Winner, he appeared in the indie farce The Ten, along with such major studio comedies as Blades of Glory, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and the remake of The Heartbreak Kid.
Corddry, most recently seen in the Will Ferrell comedy Semi-Pro, will also appear in the upcoming Patriotville, starring Justin Long; Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay; and Lower Learning, with Jason Biggs and Eva Longoria Parker.

TREAT WILLIAMS has been working steadily in both film and television

TREAT WILLIAMS (Jack Fuller, Sr.) has been working steadily in both film and television since his 1976 movie debut as squeaky-voiced detective Michael Brick in Terence McNally's bawdy comedy The Ritz.

Williams then captivated audiences playing the ebullient hippie, Berger, in the feature version of the Broadway musical Hair. Roles followed in such movies as Steven Spielberg's 1941, Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City, and the epic drama Once Upon a Time in America, as well as leads in a host of telefilms including Dempsey; A Streetcar Named Desire; the PBS adaptation, Some Men Need Help; and J. Edgar Hoover.
The actor went on to appear in the feature films Smooth Talk, The Men's Club, Sweet Lies, Dead Heat, and Heart of Dixie; and on TV in movies like Max and Helen (as Max Rosenberg), Till Death Do Us Part, The Water Engine, and Deadly Matrimony; the mini-series Drug Wars: The Camarena Story; and in the title role of the legal drama series, Eddie Dodd. He also starred opposite Shelley Long in the CBS sitcom Good Advice.

Later feature roles include Hand Gun, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, The Devil's Own, Deep Rising, The Deep End of the Ocean, Hollywood Ending, and Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous.

Williams' more recent TV credits include a long list of telefilms such as Parallel Lives, In the Shadow of Evil, HBO's The Late Shift (in which he played former super-agent Mike Ovitz), Escape: Human Cargo; Journey to the Center of the Earth; and Guilty Hearts; along with appearances on the series UC: Undercover and Going to California.

The actor gained a whole new generation of fans when he starred in the highly embraced WB series Everwood, playing small town doctor Andy Brown, from 2002 to 2006. Williams received two Screen Actors Guild Award® nominations for the part.

Most recently, he was seen in a recurring role on the ABC drama Brothers & Sisters; in the highly rated Lifetime movie The Staircase Murders; and on TNT's limited series Heartland, in which he starred as a heart surgeon.

DENNIS MILLER hit the ground running in 1985 when he was cast on TV's Saturday Night Live

DENNIS MILLER (Judge Whopper) hit the ground running in 1985 when he was cast on TV's Saturday Night Live. He spent six seasons on the popular show, most notably as the smirky "Weekend Update" anchor.

The comedian went on to host the syndicated Dennis Miller Show, which was among the first alternative TV talk shows. Though it only lasted a year, it paved the way for his far more successful outing, Dennis Miller Live, which enjoyed a nine-year, 215-episode run on HBO. Miller and his writing staff were nominated for Emmy® Awards five times over the course of the half-hour talk show's lengthy life.

During the 1990s, Miller also acted in a number of feature films including Madhouse, Disclosure, The Net, Never Talk to Strangers, Bordello of Blood, and Murder at 1600, as well as on such TV sitcoms as NewsRadio and The Norm Show.
Miller later spent two seasons as the color commentator for ABC's NFL Monday Night Football, then went on to host CNBC's hour-long prime time political show simply titled Dennis Miller.

Over the past 20 years, he also starred in and wrote the HBO specials Mr. Miller Goes to Washington; Black and White; Live From Washington DC: They Shoot HBO Specials, Don't They?; State of the Union Undressed; Citizen Arcane; The Millennium Special; The Raw Feed (2003 Emmy nomination); and All In. Miller also wrote and appeared in 2007's NFL Network special, The Monday Night Miracle.
In addition, he wrote a best-selling series of "Rant" books for Doubleday Publishing and, later, Harper-Collins.

Last year, Miller began hosting Westwood One's The Dennis Miller Show, a daily, three-hour talk show focusing on culture, current events, and politics. It airs on 138 radio stations across the United States.

Miller also currently hosts NBC's primetime game show Amne$ia.

LAKE BELL (Tipper) was most recently seen in the New Line comedy Over Her Dead Body

LAKE BELL (Tipper) was most recently seen in the New Line comedy Over Her Dead Body, co-starring with Paul Rudd and Eva Longoria Parker.

She has had regular roles on the NBC series Miss Match and Surface. Bell also recurred as Sally Heep on ABC's The Practice, a part she reprised over the course of two seasons on ABC's popular David Kelly follow-up, Boston Legal.
Other TV appearances include the NBC telefilm War Stories and a recurring role on ER.

Additional feature credits include Slammed, Speakeasy, I Love Your Work, Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders, and the upcoming thriller Still Waters.
Bell will be seen next year in New Line's police saga Pride and Glory, with Colin Farrell and Edward Norton.

TOM VAUGHAN (Director) made his feature-directing debut with the hit coming-of-age comedy Starter for 10

TOM VAUGHAN (Director) made his feature-directing debut with the hit coming-of-age comedy Starter for 10, starring James McAvoy and Dominic Cooper. The British-American co¬venture, which counted Tom Hanks and Sam Mendes among its producers, earned Vaughan a British Independent Film Award nomination as well as an Audience Award from the 2006 Austin Film Festival. The movie was also nominated last year for a UK Empire Award as Best British Film.

Following the success of Starter for 10, Vaughan directed episodes of the HBO series John From Cincinnati and Big Love.

Vaughan's career began in his native Britain where he directed the short films Super Grass and Truel, two episodes of the TV series Cold Feet, the telefilms I Saw You and Final Demand, and the four-part BBC miniseries He Knew He Was Right.

DANA FOX (Screenwriter)

DANA FOX (Screenwriter) received a B.A. degree in English and Art History from Stanford University in 1998 and a graduate degree from USC's Peter Stark Producing Program in 2000. Her debut screenplay, The Wedding Date, was produced by Gold Circle, 26 Films and Jessica Bendinger, went into production four months from completion of the first draft and was released by Universal in 2005.

Since then, Fox has worked steadily in features on both rewrites (including 27 Dresses for Spyglass and Fox 2000) and originals. She sold her original idea, What Happens in Vegas, to 20th Century Fox as a pitch. Fox is currently writing Male Doula for Vince Vaughn and Universal. As a producer, she is developing How to Get Divorced By 30 with Marc Platt and Universal. Fox was named one of Variety's Top Ten Screenwriters to Watch for 2007.

MICHAEL AGUILAR (Producer) is president of production for The Miller Company

MICHAEL AGUILAR (Producer) is president of production for The Miller Company, a production and management firm (and division of Mosaic Media Group) founded by What Happens in Vegas producer Jimmy Miller.

Aguilar was a co-producer on 2006's Best Picture Oscar® winner The Departed, directed by Martin Scorsese, and served in the same capacity on Richard Donner's Timeline.

He was a producer on both the Touchstone comedy Out Cold and the 2006 holiday release Unaccompanied Minors, as well as executive producer on Constantine.
Current executive producer credits include the Will Ferrell comedy Semi-Pro; the drama Henry Poole is Here, starring Luke Wilson and Radha Mitchell; and Patriotville, with Justin Long.

Aguilar will serve as producer on three upcoming features: the crime drama 36, the horror remake The Crazies, and the vampire thriller Damn Nation.

SHAWN LEVY (Producer) has become one of Hollywood's top comedy directors

SHAWN LEVY (Producer) has become one of Hollywood's top comedy directors after helming such hit films as Just Married, remakes of both Cheaper By the Dozen and The Pink Panther, and the international smash Night at the Museum.

Previous feature directing credits include Just in Time, Address Unknown, and Big Fat Liar.

Levy gained early directing success in television, where he worked on such youth-oriented series as The Secret World of Alex Mack, Lassie, The Journey of Allen Strange, So Weird, Animorphs, In a Heartbeat, and, most notably, The Famous Jett Jackson, for which he directed 49 episodes. During that period, he also directed episodes of the series Dead Man's Gun and First Wave, as well as the Disney telefilm Jett Jackson: the Movie.

He later directed episodes of the WB series Do Over and Birds of Prey, as well as the pilot for the network's Pepper Dennis.

Levy's producing credits include Night at the Museum and the Fox sequel Cheaper By the Dozen 2. He also served as executive producer on both Jett Jackson: The Movie and the subsequent Jett Jackson series; was a producer on the PAX telefilm I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus; and executive produced the WB series Pepper Dennis.
He most recently produced the feature comedy The Rocker and executive produced Pink Panther 2.

Next up for Levy are directing and producing chores on Fox's Night at the Museum: Escape From the Smithsonian.

JIMMY MILLER (Producer) is a partner in Mosaic Media Group

JIMMY MILLER (Producer) is a partner in Mosaic Media Group and head of its Miller Company production and management division.

He manages some of the most sought-after talent in show business including actors Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, and Sacha Baron Cohen; writer/directors Judd Apatow and Adam McKay; and producer/director Jay Roach.

Miller's film producing credits include Elf, Kicking & Screaming, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and the recent Will Ferrell comedy Semi-Pro.
For television, Miller produced the Canadian comedy Reelmadness (which starred Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, and Colin Quinn), the hit CBS drama The Guardian, the Fox comedy Happy Hour, and the NBC sitcom Twenty Good Years.

This summer, the producer will be represented on the big screen by the feature adaptation of the classic TV series Get Smart, starring Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway, and by the Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly comedy Step Brothers.

Future productions for Miller include the romantic comedy She's Out of My League and the feature remake of the popular 1970s adventure series Land of the Lost, to star Will Ferrell and Anna Friel.

ARNON MILCHAN (Producer) is widely renowned as one of the most prolific and successful independent film producers

ARNON MILCHAN (Producer) is widely renowned as one of the most prolific and successful independent film producers of the past 25 years, with over 100 feature films to his credit. Born in Israel, Milchan was educated at the University of Geneva. His first business venture was transforming his father's modest business into one of his country's largest agro-chemical companies. This early achievement was a harbinger of Milchan's now-legendary reputation in the international marketplace as a keen businessman.

Soon, Milchan began to underwrite projects in areas that had always held a special interest for him -- film, television and theater. Early projects include Roman Polanski's theater production of Amadeus, Dizengoff 99, La Menace, The Medusa Touch and the mini-series Masada. By the end of the 1980s, Milchan had produced such films as Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy, Sergio Leone's Once Upon at Time in America and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

After the huge successes of Pretty Woman and The War of the Roses, Milchan founded New Regency Productions and went on to produce a string of successful films including J.F.K, Sommersby, A Time to Kill, Free Willy, The Client, Tin Cup, Under Siege, L.A. Confidential, The Devil's Advocate, The Negotiator, City of Angels, Entrapment, Fight Club, Big Momma's House, Don't Say a Word, Daredevil, Man on Fire, Guess Who, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Big Momma's House 2, Date Movie, Firehouse Dog and the recent box-office hits Alvin and the Chipmunks and Jumper.

Upcoming projects include: Meet Dave, a fish-out-of-water comedy starring Eddie Murphy; They Came From Upstairs, a comedy-adventure about teens who defend their vacation home in Michigan from aliens; and Mirrors, a thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland.

Along the way, Milchan brought on board two powerful investors and partners who share his vision: Nine Network and Twentieth Century Fox. Fox distributes Regency movies in all media worldwide (excluding an output arrangement Regency has in Germany), including on U.S. pay television, and international pay and free television.

Milchan also successfully diversified his company's activities within the sphere of entertainment, most specifically in the realm of television through Regency Television ("Malcolm in the Middle," "The Bernie Mac Show"). Regency recently acquired a stake in Channel 10, BabyFirstTV, and an Israeli TV network. In addition, Regency holds television rights to Sony Ericsson Women's Tennis Association events.

JOE CARACCIOLO, JR., DEAN GEORGARIS

JOE CARACCIOLO, JR. (Executive Producer) has held a variety of feature production titles over the last twenty years.

He executive produced the films Second Sight, Tune In Tomorrow, Glengarry Glen Ross, Serial Mom, A Good Man in Africa, The Man Who Knew Too Little, Pecker, Uptown Girls, Hide and Seek, Just My Luck, and The Devil Wears Prada.

Producer credits include Radio Inside; I Love You, I Love You Not; Simply Irresistible; Cecil B. Demented; and Swimfan. He also co-produced Copycat.

Caracciolo was a production manager on Running On Empty, Mortal Thoughts, Freejack, Copycat, Cecil B. Demented, Mr. Deeds, and Uptown Girls; and line produced Mortal Thoughts.

DEAN GEORGARIS (Executive Producer) has written the features Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Paycheck, the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and Tristan & Isolde.

Georgaris wrote and will produce the upcoming feature 36, a remake of the French crime drama 36 Quai des Orfevres. He is also slated to produce the films The Crazies and Damn Nation along with What Happens in Vegas producer Michael Aguilar.

MATTHEW LEONETTI, ASC (Director of Photography) Breaking Away, Poltergeist, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jagged Edge

MATTHEW LEONETTI, ASC (Director of Photography) has worked consistently behind the camera since the mid-1970s, building a resume that boasts over 75 feature and TV movie titles.

Leonetti's many feature film credits include Breaking Away, Poltergeist, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jagged Edge, Dead Again, Star Trek: First Contact, and Star Trek: Insurrection.

He has also shot such theatrical releases as Raise the Titanic, Eyewitness, Songwriter, Weird Science, Commando, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Dragnet, Red Heat, Hard to Kill, Another 48 Hrs., Leap of Faith, Angels in the Outfield, A Low Down Dirty Shame, Strange Days, and Species II.

More recently, Leonetti served as cinematographer on features like Along Came a Spider, Rush Hour 2, 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Butterfly Effect, the Dawn of the Dead remake, Fever Pitch, Accepted, Pride, and last year's redo of The Heartbreak Kid.
Early in his career, he shot an impressive roster of TV movies including The Elevator, Hurricane, Terror on the 40th Floor, It Couldn't Happen to a Nicer Guy, Search for the Gods, The Deadly Tower, The Lives of Jenny Dolan, The Call of the Wild, Flight to Holocaust, The Hostage Heart, Superdome, Ruby and Oswald, A Fire in the Sky, The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal, and Willa.

Later telefilms include Crazy Times, Stand By Your Man, Mae West, American Geisha, Under the Influence, and Secret Witness.

MATTHEW FRIEDMAN (Editor) Certain Guys, We Married Margo, Cold Heart, The Last Run, The Truth About Miranda

MATTHEW FRIEDMAN (Editor) served in the same capacity on such studio features as I Spy, John Tucker Must Die, and Over Her Dead Body.

His many independent film credits include Certain Guys, We Married Margo, Cold Heart, The Last Run, The Truth About Miranda, English as a Second Language, Novel Romance, and, most recently Peter Lefcourt's The Deal, starring William H. Macy and Meg Ryan.

Friedman also edited the TV pilots for the Fox series The Loop and the WB's Pepper Dennis.

In addition, he held a variety of assistant editing jobs on such features as Tollbooth, The Crew, How to Make an American Quilt, Private Parts, the Doctor Dolittle remake, The Muse, 28 Days, and Road Trip.

STUART WURTZEL (Production Designer) Brighton Beach Memoirs, Suspect, The House On Carroll Street, Old Gringo, Staying Together

STUART WURTZEL (Production Designer) has amassed over 40 major feature and telefilm credits during his thirty-plus years designing for the screen. His work has been honored with an Oscar nomination, three Emmy Award nominations (including one win), and two Art Directors Guild Awards.

His earliest features include such 1970s titles as Hester Street, Between the Lines, and Hair followed in the 1980s by Times Square, The Chosen, Tattoo, and Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters, for which he earned an Oscar nomination.

Subsequent 1980s film credits include Brighton Beach Memoirs, Suspect, The House On Carroll Street, Old Gringo, Staying Together, and An Innocent Man; as well as the TV movies The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, Little Gloria...Happy at Last (Emmy nomination), Murder in Coweta County, and Pope John Paul II.

Wurtzel designed a succession of features throughout the next decade such as 3 Men and a Little Lady, Mermaids, The Mambo Kings, Used People, Romeo Is Bleeding, When a Man Loves a Woman, I.Q., Before and After, Ghost and the Darkness, Jungle 2 Jungle, and Stepmom.

Later motion picture credits include Isn't She Great, Murder By Numbers, Little Manhattan, and Charlotte's Web, along with the much-honored HBO films Wit, Angels in America (Emmy win and Art Directors Guild award), and Empire Falls (Emmy nomination and Art Directors Guild award).

Wurtzel most recently designed the Disney hit Enchanted and the pilot episode of NBC's Lipstick Jungle.

RENEÉ EHRLICH KALFUS (Costume Designer) Once Around, With Honors, Safe Passage, Let It Be Me, The Evening Star, Addicted to Love

RENEÉ EHRLICH KALFUS (Costume Designer) has designed the wardrobe for such acclaimed features as What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Dead Man Walking, The Cider House Rules, and Chocolat. For the latter she was nominated for both BAFTA and Costume Designers Guild awards.

Other film credits include Once Around, With Honors, Safe Passage, Let It Be Me, The Evening Star, Addicted to Love, Snow Falling On Cedars, Pay It Forward, The Shipping News, The Life of David Gale, Ladder 49, and Game 6.

She recently worked on the features Perfect Stranger, Feast of Love, and the current Baby Mama, with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

CHRISTOPHE BECK (Composer) License to Wed, We Are Marshall, School for Scoundrels, Yours, Mine and Ours, Taxi

CHRISTOPHE BECK (Composer) has composed the score of well over 40 feature films and nearly 20 television shows. With over 15 years of experience, Beck has scored a wide array of projects, including such action films as The Sentinel and Elektra, the comedies Charlie Bartlett, The Pink Panther and Bring It On, and such dramas as Under the Tuscan Sun and Year of the Dog.

He also recently composed the scores of Fred Claus, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising and the comedy Drillbit Taylor. His other film credits include License to Wed, We Are Marshall, School for Scoundrels, Yours, Mine and Ours, Taxi, A Cinderella Story, Saved!, Garfield, Cheaper by the Dozen, American Wedding and Just Married.

DEVA ANDERSON (Music Supervisor) Star Maps, Palmetto, Beloved, Anywhere But Here, My Dog Skip, The Center of the World

DEVA ANDERSON (Music Supervisor) has served in the same capacity on the feature films Star Maps, Palmetto, Beloved, Anywhere But Here, My Dog Skip, The Center of the World, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Murder By Numbers, The Truth About Charlie, Racing Stripes, Because of Winn-Dixie, Last Holiday, Starter for 10, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and, most recently, Charlie Wilson's War, One Missed Call, and the upcoming The Great Buck Howard.

For television, Anderson has supervised the music for the movies Tuesdays With Morrie, Amy & Isabelle, and Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom's One More Day; the HBO/Playtone miniseries John Adams and The Pacific; and the HBO series The Comeback and Big Love.

The Strangers Physical Demands Of The Shoot

As called for in Bertino"s story, the lead actors were put through the wringer far more than the trio of Strangers. "This role was emotionally, and especially physically, draining," says Tyler, who was additionally stricken with tonsillitis during the shoot. "Usually, on a movie, there are a couple of scenes that you know will be tough to do, and you think, "I"ll just have to get through that particular day." This was two months of that. We worked long hours. It was by far the hardest film shoot I"ve ever been a part of."

In addition to sustaining actual cuts, bruises and sores, in addition to the throat trouble, the actress was obliged to be made up with fake blood and have black paint brushed under her fingernails and over her hands. "In The Lord of the Rings, I only had to do one sequence on a horse," Tyler says. "On this shoot, I would come in each morning, clean and showered, then get disgusting. It was an amazing challenge every day, and I didn"t know I had it in me. But by the end of the shoot, my body was gone."

To help realize Bertino"s desired sustained pitch of heart-pounding, breathholding fear, both Tyler and Speedman often ran sprints on and around the set, returning to their marks just seconds before the writer/director called, "Action!" Tyler estimates, "I probably ran a mile a day. Scott and I would be all out of breath and sweaty."

Bertino notes, "Liv definitely connected to what Kristen was going through. We talked a lot about the physical demands beforehand, and she worked incredibly hard. Also, she"s barefoot for basically the entire movie. There were times during the shoot when I would look down at her bruised feet and feel horrible that I hadn"t written, "Kristen is wearing tennis shoes."

"Despite the actors" endless days of running, crawling and hiding, stunt coordinator CAL JOHNSON provides, "The Strangers isn"t a stunt-heavy movie. But even with the little stuff, we still needed to take the time to figure it out and protect our actors and stunt people." Johnson himself stepped in to double for an actor in one of the film"s most shocking moments.

Given that The Strangers is her maiden effort in the genre, Tyler also developed a "screen scream." The performer provides, "I was really worried at first, because I had no idea what it would sound or look like. All of a sudden, this huge scream came out; I think I terrified everybody."

Bertino agrees: "Liv is an amazing screamer. She and I talked about not doing "practice screams," because I wanted to capture the horror moments as they happen for Kristen. On the first take of the first time she had to scream, I had my fingers crossed, and she really let loose. It shook us up. Beyond that, there are violent scenes that get played out in this movie, and some of them were upsetting to people on set to watch. Everyone became attached to Kristen and James, and to Liv and Scott."

Speedman adds, "For the heaviest emotional scenes Liv and I had to play, Bryan kept two cameras going so we wouldn"t have to shoot all day. With those heightened moments between characters, you don"t want to repeat things over and over. Bryan was also comfortable with our doing things that had not been in his script. He wasn"t overprotective of it."

Similarly, the actors playing The Strangers were free to explore their characters" shared dynamics, since, as Bertino says, "We give no outside information. Kristen and James don"t have any, which is a perspective"or lack of it"that adds to the horror."

Weeks says, "Being in a world where we are so desensitized by the Internet, TV, war, video games, YouTube, I felt we had lost what should be a basic human response to violence and, more specifically, to death itself. In some demented way, we were trying to reestablish those feelings of guilt and sorrow by experiencing the violence firsthand." Ward adds that what helped her with motivation was to believe that "these people don"t have a lot to say. They want to dominate something for the first time in their lives, controlling the situation."

Margolis concurs: "I think my character has the nerve to do what she does largely because she"s wearing a mask. In her regular life, she doesn"t have any power or control. But when she puts on this mask, she controls everything." Behind the Masks
The design of the masks for The Strangers was as important to the film as the design of the Hoyt house. Bertino states, "I wanted the masks to feel basic and accessible, and to represent imagery we can all recognize and respond to. When we walk into a room, we look at people"s features, at their eyes. We wonder, "Is this person friendly"" With that taken away, Kristen and James are even more vulnerable."

After several drafts of designs, the masks for Pin-Up Girl and Dollface were created in vacuform plastic; The Man in the Mask"s was made out of cotton. Weeks offers, "The fact that these are the kind of masks anyone could buy anywhere, or put together, just makes the whole scenario that much realistic."

For all their simplicity and on-set familiarity, the masks still cast a chill. Liv Tyler reveals, "I have always found masks of all kinds creepy, because you don"t know what"s behind them. At first, I couldn"t bear to be near them at all."

Scott Speedman agrees: "It was hard to look at these. There was a deadness in the eyes, like a shark"s. Pin-Up Girl"s mask was really quite scary. Laura turned into a whole different person when she put it on."

Margolis surmises how unsettling it was to play a woman who delighted in capturing and torturing her prey: "What I found so terrifying was that there was no humanity in her. It doesn"t seem like there"s a person who feels and hurts, and that"s part of why my character does what she does. To play her, I did have to tap into things in myself that I don"t want to believe are there."

Surprisingly, the trio of actors warmed to the process of wearing their masks while performing. "There weren"t many difficulties and I was not uncomfortable," says Weeks. "You can convey a character through so many things other than your face"your movement, your posture, the way you breathe. The mask became another part of me, and I could convey every emotion with it."

Ward muses, "It was freeing, in a way. Because of my regular job as a model, I had a very strong reaction to wearing the mask. I was not as self-conscious. I could get in there and be as scary and menacing as I wanted to be"and feed off of the reaction from having a mask on. There was a power to it."

Margolis also found the experience to be "kind of liberating." She adds, "If anything, it was more challenging for Liv and Scott, who didn"t get to see any emotion on our faces."

Speedman confirms, "I didn"t ask the three of them what their thought process for their characters was. But it worked!"

As shooting ended, the cast and crew looked back on their experience and on their thoughts on the thriller they made. "It"s a love story, a drama and a horror movie," says Tyler. "The film has different elements and levels to it. Oftentimes, scary movies are about the scares. This film is so different. To be truly afraid"and showing it"is shocking not only to other people, but also to yourself."
"What happens in this movie could happen and does happen," reflects Speedman. "What"s scary is how real it is. Hopefully, we let the audience in a bit with this, and that"s different than most horror movies. You get to sit with these people for awhile and get to know them."

Of his hopes for the project he started on those late nights several years ago, writer/director Bertino concludes, "So often now, people go to the movies and are distanced from what"s happening on screen because it could never happen to them. We strip that away with The Strangers.”

The Strangers Production Design Of The Film

With a screenplay and cast in place, preproduction on The Strangers began. Given that 90 percent of the film"s incidents take place in and around a house in the dead of night, design and construction needed to be finalized well in advance of shooting. The first-time director, logically, carefully storyboarded the scenes to be shot with production designer John D. Kretschmer.

Kretschmer, whose design work includes the suspense films The In Crowd and Deceiver, believed Bertino"s screenplay detailed "not a horror film, but a terror film. We all have these fears, and Bryan prods at them in a unique way." He admits, "When reading, I was gripping the pages."

To contribute to a "this could happen to you" feeling for the audience, no geographical location was specified in the script. That didn"t mean, however, that Bertino wouldn"t design a blueprint of the Hoyt family vacation home in his exacting script. Of this, Kretschmer commends, "Bryan cleverly and thoughtfully built the architecture of the movie into the screenplay. So, I could tell which way the hallway turned and where the kitchen and the bedrooms were. He conveyed a very visual sense, as well as succinct blocking. When I spoke with him, it was clear that we were on the same page regarding the style of the house."

In fact, when Bertino met with Kretschmer and they compared floor plans, the production designer marveled at their complementary ideas. He laughs, "Mine was almost exactly the same one that he had drawn three years earlier and 3,000 miles away." Kretschmer and Bertino"s design strategy pivoted on a central twist. "In your classic horror movie, there"s a house on a hill"this scary place that you"re standing back from and looking at," says Kretschmer. "The Strangers reverses that; we"re on the inside looking out, instead of the other way around."

The home set was built on a warehouse-turned-soundstage in Florence, South Carolina. The process of creating the set took eight weeks: two to design, two to draw up blueprints and four to build.

The production designer and his team systematically built the interior of a roughly 2,000-square-foot home to allow for several weeks of filming. During the construction process, Kretschmer conferred extensively with Bertino and director of photography Peter Sova. Kretschmer notes, "We had to be able to allow Peter"s camera to go anywhere it needed to go, so that Bryan could get all his shots. He wanted the audience to be right there with the characters. The entire interior was flexible and functional; all of the walls were able to be moved as needed."

Along with set decorator MISSY BERENT, Kretschmer"s team designed from the inside out to offer the feeling that the interior of the home is propelling the audience outward. As Kristen and James struggle to get out of the house of terror, the viewer wants to run out with them, even if uncertain of what lies beyond the front porch. Bertino"s admiration of 1970s films influenced not only his screenplay, but also the set decoration. For the Hoyt family vacation home, the mandate was to make the interior full of warm dark hues, comfort and familiarity. Kretschmer provides, "It"s the kind of house that Bryan and I, and a lot of people, grew up in"a cozy, safe place that"s full of strong memories. This makes the picture even more frightening, because you realize that terror can occur even in your most comfortable environments."

For the house"s exterior, the director and the production designer again recalled their upbringings. "A ranch house built in the 1970s was something that Bryan and I were familiar with," says Kretschmer. "I grew up in North Carolina and Bryan grew up in Texas, and we both knew these types of houses."

Perfectly fitting the "casting call" and selected to portray the exterior of the Hoyt home was a family-built, "70s-era brick ranch house located in Timmonsville, South Carolina, about 10 miles southwest of Florence. Bertino recalls, "It looked the part" situated in a close-knit neighborhood, yet eerily isolated during the winter when James and Kristen are visiting."

The house and property had the details called for in the script: a garage, driveway of a certain length, imposing trees in a large backyard and a metal barn that was the perfect distance from the road (and possible passersby who could aid Kristen and James). When Bertino, Kretschmer and location scout STEVE RHEA arrived at the house, they instantly knew it was their Hoyt home. Fortunately, they were able to integrate the agreed-upon interior design with the look of this Timmonsville property.
The only element that had to be built and added to the house"s exterior was the back porch specified in the script. Kretschmer and his team added sliding glass doors, classic examples of "70s-era architecture, that led to the porch.

Because of the damage that The Man in the Mask would inflict upon it in several scenes, multiple copies of the existing carved wooden front door on the Timmonsville house were created. The "stunt doors" were individually mounted onto parts of the entranceway, creating a small set within the existing location.

To add to the creepiness, Bertino designed some additional surprises for the cast. He says, "When we were shooting at that house, you really couldn"t hear nearby cars. But you could hear things in and around the house, so we had crew members generate unexplained noises during, or just before, takes. The actors felt like they were there, and they would get surprised and scared. We would too."

For the film"s flashback scenes in which we see Kristen and James at the wedding, additional lensing took place in and around Florence at the Pee Dee Shrine Club, at the Hilton Garden Inn and on residential streets. South Carolina"s seventh largest city, located in the northeast part of the state, Florence has seen increased filming activity due to the South Carolina legislature"s June 2006 passage of large tax incentives for film productions in the state, as well as through the efforts of the Florence County Economic Development Partnership (FCEDP). The three-month shoot of The Strangers provided jobs for residents and funneled millions of dollars of business into the area"s economy.

For the most part, the production opted to shoot the film in chronological order. Mostly, it received unexpected atmospheric benefits from the weather. However, rain, wind, fog and unseasonably cold weather all impacted the shoot at various times. Bertino admits: "We had to make some changes because of the rain. But while it forced our hand [sometimes resulting in reshoots because of the swampy mess], we"d often find out that the revisions looked the way we should have gone all along."
Adds Kip Weeks, "The elements became part of the story and part of our performances. It made the shoot more natural; we really were running through mud, so we didn"t have to pretend."

The Strangers Casting The Film

In addition to keeping the writer"s vision intact, the team wanted to further anchor the project with an actress who was fresh to the horror genre. Bertino provides, "Liv Tyler is that rare actress who is beautiful, yet also accessible. When I found out she was interested, all it took was one meeting for me to want her in this movie."

Tyler, an audience favorite since her days as the immortal Elvish princess Arwen in Peter Jackson"s blockbuster fantasy The Lord of the Rings trilogy, read the script and was quite impressed by what she found. Tyler enthuses that she "couldn"t put it down. It was the first time in a couple of years that I knew I was reading something I absolutely wanted to do.

"I saw layers in it of love story, drama and horror"all of them unconventional," continues the actress. "I especially liked Bryan"s way of saying a lot, but not saying everything. Often in movies, it"s all spelled out for you, and the dialogue is very explanatory. But Bryan doesn"t write like that; he writes how normal people communicate"with questions lingering. I knew it would be interesting to act that."
Recently seen as an unwilling lycan in the action-adventure films Underworld and Underworld: Evolution, Scott Speedman signed on to star opposite Tyler as the other half of the besieged couple. Of his interest in the role, he offers, "Kristen and James are not "chosen" because of sins from their past, or because they did something wrong. There"s no supernatural element; like the Manson family, The Strangers just want to harm." Speedman also found what others who had read Bertino"s script were shaken by. "Bryan doesn"t just go right to the scares. The audience actually gets time to breathe with the characters before things get scary as hell. That got me interested from the first pages." Not only was Speedman excited about the project after he read the screenplay, he couldn"t agree more with the casting of the film"s Kristen. "While this was one of the better scripts I"ve read, I also knew that if Liv Tyler was doing the movie, it was going to be good. She always is very organic and alive on screen, and she could generate chemistry with a bedpost."
Tyler returns the compliment to the actor with whom she would spend many days huddled in shared fear. "I"ve never worked so closely with another actor before; we"re in almost all our scenes together. Scott was generous and giving, which helped us convey the intimacy the script called for"showing that Kristen and James care for each other."

Both Speedman and Tyler were astonished to find that the author of such a powerful screenplay was, in fact, their junior. "With Bryan, I thought, "I can"t believe I"m working with a director who"s younger than I am,"" Tyler continues. "But as the writer and the director, he saw the big picture"not only of Scott"s and my characters, but also of The Strangers and the movie as a whole."

Bertino was just as proud of the efforts his Kristen and James gave the project. He shares, "I was very fortunate that Liv and Scott brought so much to what I had written. We were able to take things from them and add in extra elements for Kristen and James. This was so helpful in establishing their characters before things get rough, and also for the scenes that have little or no dialogue and are in long takes."

With the terrorized couple in place, the filmmakers were ready to cast the group of relentless intruders. Casting The Strangers called for a unique auditioning process to find three performers who could elicit pure terror in the audience while their masked faces (which are never revealed) show zero affect. Bertino and the producers knew that filmgoers, by not being able to read the expressions of the unwelcome visitors, would project pure terror onto their upcoming actions...and find even greater sympathy for the couple"s plight.

Executive producer Sonny Mallhi reveals, "We asked actors to tell us who The Strangers were to them. This helped us find performers who are not typical horror movie villains, which was part of Bryan"s motif." For example, the willowy actress Gemma Ward looked exactly like what Bertino pictured for his Dollface (hidden by a kewpie-doll mask that is framed by waxen yellow hair). While she appears sweet and innocent, the first Stranger to whom the audience is introduced is extraordinarily intimidating.

Of The Stranger who comes knocking first, Bertino elaborates, "All during the scripting, I had a look in mind for Dollface. This woman would have to be beautiful and seemingly very warm, but with an underlying darkness"perhaps even darker than the other Strangers. When I met with Gemma, I knew she was ideal for the part, especially because she has a lot going on behind her eyes. For a young woman, she has an old soul. Because of her, the character went to a different level than I had anticipated; she has great instincts and would bring little touches to Dollface every day."

The supermodel, who has her first major film role in The Strangers, reveals, "I"m a huge fan of scary movies, and reading Bryan"s script I thought, "Wow, this is different." This story is so raw and intense. No amount of pleading from Kristen and James will talk The Strangers out of what they have come to do. To get inspiration for Dollface, I read "Helter Skelter," so I could get a feel for twisted girls and how their minds work when they reach a certain point."

Recently seen in the sports drama Glory Road, Kip Weeks, who plays The Man in the Mask (a monster hidden behind a cloth, scarecrow-like mask), feels that "these three cross all rational lines, which is their choice. Knowing that any one of us, at any time, could encounter a situation like Kristen and James do made the story so intriguing to me."

Of the solitary male Stranger, EP Mallhi notes, "We wanted The Man in the Mask to be scary, but not in the manner of the iconic masked characters in horror movies. Kip is tall but not hulking, and he is able to convey how his character wants to do all these horrible things."

The role of the third Stranger, Pin-Up Girl"with a face covered by a "Betty Boop-type" mask"went to Laura Margolis of the ABC series Dirty Sexy Money. "Laura just had this sense of the character," says Mallhi. "She"s also shorter than Kip and Gemma, which matched up well with Pin-Up Girl being, arguably, the meekest of the trio."

Margolis remembers, "The script was a page-turner; I couldn"t read it fast enough. There was so much depth to the characters of Kristen and James, and to what The Strangers do to them and their relationship."

Cast to play Kristen and James" unsuspecting friend Mike"who arrives pre-dawn at James" family"s vacation home to pick up his buddy"was Glenn Howerton. Known for his comedic role on television"s It"s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Howerton jumped at the chance to make a scary movie. A fan of horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, Howerton enjoyed that Bertino"s non-supernatural script was smart. "It was less about turning the corner, the cat jumping up and meowing and everybody screaming, "Oh!"" Howerton offers. "The scares are less obvious. They"re the best kind: psychological."

The Strangers About The Production

First time writer / director Bryan Bertino has long been interested in complex characters and telling their stories; he found his way into the suspense genre as a way of better connecting with his audience. Bertino admits, "Early on when I started writing, I figured out that a way to connect with people was to scare them. Through doing that, you can talk about other emotions, other feelings and connect with them more easily."

For his first screenplay, originally titled The Faces (ultimately The Strangers), he explored the fact that often violence can be senseless. The filmmaker says, "Crimes are committed all the time that nobody has a chance to explain to the victim why it happened. It just happens. And we"re left to deal with the aftermath." Bertino would take that concept and craft a script that focused on a primal fear we all harbor: What would you do if you were under attack by people whose only mission was to harm you and the person you loved most"

On his inspiration, Bertino reflects: "Something gets missed in a lot of scary movies these days. I set out to write a raw, spare script that would have only a few characters in it"one with a couple in a relationship, rather than just two people suddenly brought together. I didn"t want to lose sight of the characters and go right to the scares. By concentrating on both, I hoped to access a lot of different emotions"on screen and with audiences."

In crafting his screenplay, he looked to the world imagined by master horror filmmakers from another era. He continues, "The thrillers that inspired me come from the 1970s. So I wanted to create one that explores something that could happen with characters at their most vulnerable, like movies did back then."

The story for The Strangers unfolds over a period of several hours, beginning the night before the terrifying events. We meet a couple at the wedding of the young woman"s college friend. Exhausted and inebriated, Kristen and James leave the reception and return to the vacation home they are visiting. Shortly thereafter, they are visited and subsequently attacked by three masked intruders.

As with most great scares, pieces of the writer/director"s script were based in reality. Bertino remembers, "That part of the story came to me from a childhood memory. As a kid, I lived in a house on a street in the middle of nowhere. One night, while our parents were out, somebody knocked on the front door and my little sister answered it. At the door were some people asking for somebody that didn"t live there. We later found out that these people were knocking on doors in the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses. In The Strangers, the fact that someone is at home does not deter the people who"ve knocked on the front door; it"s the reverse."

In fall 2004, the screenplay landed Bertino manager Michael Connolly, who was excited by the script and felt it would be a very feasible sell. Connolly then coordinated a meeting with production company Vertigo Entertainment. When executive producer Sonny Mallhi and his longtime colleagues at Vertigo, producers Roy Lee and Doug Davison, read Bertino"s script, they felt as if they had found something distinctive that would stand out in the current movie climate. Mallhi notes, "It was different from other horror movies, and different from the other movies we had done at Vertigo. This one felt more real, in that it could actually happen to you, in your own backyard."

Mallhi was not only fascinated by the haunting quality of Bertino"s words, but the heartbreaking end of a romance that was The Strangers" throughline. "There was also a love story involved," Mallhi remembers. "The relationship between Kristen and James, two people you care about, is an element that you don"t see in a lot of these kinds of movies."

Vertigo bought the script, and the elated Bertino quit his job. "I was now confident enough that I didn"t have to work as a grip anymore," he laughs. While Bertino further tightened the screenplay, Vertigo joined forces with another production company, Mandate Pictures, with which it had previously successfully partnered on The Grudge and The Grudge 2. The Strangers was soon headquartered for development and production at Rogue Pictures, where Vertigo was already working on other projects.

Logically, the producers interviewed several interested directors, most of whom wanted to alter the script to their sensibilities. Ultimately, it was Bertino who broke out of the pack of potential directors. The production team realized that the man whose original vision was The Strangers was the same person who could best direct the screenplay.

Bertino recalls: "We felt I could bring it to life better than anyone else and retain my original inspirations and intentions for the script." That process wouldn"t, however, be as simple as a new director might have expected. The filmmaker states, "Although, as the director, I did sometimes argue with myself as the writer; it was always clear where the story was meant to go and what the balances among the characters were."

With a working script in hand and an eager first-time director ready to get started, it was time to cast two actors who could spend hours upon hours being chased in the dead of night"and several others who were eager to stalk them.

"Strangers" is a suspense thriller revolving around a couple in a remote suburban house

Lock the door. Pretend you're safe.

"Strangers" is a suspense thriller revolving around a couple in a remote suburban house who are targeted by three dangerous masked strangers. The resulting clashes force the couple to go well beyond what they thought themselves capable of in order to survive.

The horrifying events that took place in the Hoyt family's vacation home at 1801 Clark Road on February 11, 2005, are still not entirely known.
Champagne. Rose petals. Candlelight. It was supposed to be a night of celebration for Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman). But after leaving a friend's wedding reception and returning to the house, everything had collapsed for the happy couple.

Then came a 4 a.m. knock on the door and a haunting voice: Is Tamara here?
Writer/director Bryan Bertino explores our most universal fears in The Strangers, a terrifying suspense thriller about a couple whose remote getaway becomes a place of terror when masked strangers invade. The confrontation forces Kristen and James to go far beyond what they thought themselves capable of if they hope to survive.

Sex and the City The actors’ high regard for their director also contributed to the good feeling on set

Throughout the course of the story, Conway not only recreated the homes of Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda, but also created new environments for Samantha, Mr. Big and others. “Sometimes Michael Patrick King would call it like a confection or an ice cream sundae,” says Conway about the look of the film. “He said, people are going to watch this movie and know about fashion, and what Pat Field is going to do, and he said, I want to do the same thing for anyone who’s interested in architecture and interior design.’”

Another key player who created the film’s gorgeous look is cinematographer John Thomas, who also photographed much of the Sex and the City series, including the Paris episodes in the series’ final season. “I think it’s the best work of his career,” says Parker. “It’s incredible work that he’s been doing.”
“John Thomas’ work in the movie is beautiful,” agrees Michael Patrick King. “The lighting is amazing, and he is great to work with.” In fact, Thomas’ talent was matched by his easy-going manner on the set, a work environment that was enjoyed by all.

The actors’ high regard for their director also contributed to the good feeling on set. “Michael is very supporting and very loving,” says Cynthia Nixon. “He just sends all his good vibes at us all the time.”

“Michael Patrick makes us laugh every day,” adds Kristin Davis, who is astounded by the director’s immersion in the project. “He has some strange ability to be all the characters,” she says. “Sometimes he’ll come to direct a scene in the movie, and he’ll be really choked up. It’s so adorable. He’s written it and lived it.”

“If this movie has any success, it’s because of his intense passion to do it right,” adds Sarah Jessica Parker about King. “He’s very inspiring.”

“I can say it was really fun to direct a movie like this because of the people I worked with,” says King. “They’re all geniuses. All the actresses are amazing, the actors are amazing, the designers are amazing. So for me, it’s like being a kid in a candy store.”

King hopes viewers of Sex and the City will have a similarly pleasurable experience watching the film. “I always thought that the series was a roller coaster,” he says. “And I think the movie is like a major roller coaster, with ups and downs and twists.”

King also hopes viewers of the film Sex and the City will find in the movie not only what they loved from the series, but will experience something more, as well. “When you go to the movies, you want to learn something about life, or laugh about life, or cry about life,” he says. “And hopefully, with the movie, you’ll be able to laugh and really cry.

“I want people leaving the movie theater feeling, ‘all right, great, that was a lot!,’” he concludes. “That was drinks, appetizer, main course, and dessert, dessert, dessert!”

The restaurants where Sex and the City filmed included Buddakan and 202 Restaurant in Chelsea

While the series had attracted attention when it filmed on the streets of New York, neither the cast nor the crew were quite prepared for the reception that greeted the film when cameras started to roll. Hundreds of New Yorkers, tourists, paparazzi and journalists jammed the streets every single day that Sex and the City filmed on location.

“When we came back to shoot the movie, I was intellectually prepared, I thought, for some level of interest on the streets,” says Parker. “But I don’t think I had any understanding of the degree to which people’s interest would be.”

Kim Cattrall, who plays Carrie’s outrageously glamorous friend Samantha, was similarly unprepared for the amount of interest in the production. “The first day I expected a group of fans or onlookers or some press,” she says. “But when I came to the set, and stepped out of the car in the morning, I felt like I was at a premiere.”

“It was like a three-ring circus,” adds Kristin Davis. “It was stunning. Not a day would go by that someone wouldn’t say how much they miss the show or how much they love the show. They’re very supportive fans.”

While the task of crowd control threatened to slow production, the expertise of assistant director Bettiann Fishman, a Sex and the City veteran who was given the nickname “Bullhorn Betty” on the film, kept the crowds happy, entertained and in check.

Among the locations where the film shot were on Fifth Avenue, outside Tiffany’s and Saks; Christie’s auction house, Vogue’s offices in the Condé Nast building, the Riccardo Maggiore Salon and Hotel Giraffe in midtown; Bryant Park and the neighboring main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue; the stores Vitra and Diane Von Furstenberg in the meat-packing district; Nick’s Hair Salon in Greenwich Village; on Henry Street on the Lower East Side, Park Avenue on the Upper East Side, Perry Street in Greenwich Village, and Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn; the Mercer Hotel and Luce Plan furniture store in Soho; the Central Park reservoir, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

The restaurants where Sex and the City filmed included Buddakan and 202 Restaurant in Chelsea, The Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel and Lumi on the Upper East Side, Junior’s in Brooklyn, Raoul’s in Soho, the House near Gramercy Park, Starbucks at Astor Place, Good World Café in Chinatown and The Modern in midtown. The production also ventured outside New York City to shoot in Malibu, outside Gucci on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, on the UCLA campus and in Simi Valley, California.

When not shooting on location, the production returned to film at the same stages where the series had been created, Silvercup Studios, in Long Island City, New York. “It was surreal,” says Cynthia Nixon, who plays Miranda, Carrie’s straight-shooter friend, an attorney. “When you come back to the studio and there’s your old dressing room, and you go into the wardrobe room and it’s exactly as it was, and all the same people are there, you do feel like you’re stepping back in time.”

“I think the most surreal moment was stepping into Carrie’s apartment,” says Sarah Jessica Parker. “Because it had been re-established virtually identically. I think they call it forensic archeology, like when a house burns down and you want to rebuild it. I was like, ‘This is wonderful and bizarre.’”

“Sarah Jessica had stored a lot of stuff, God bless her,” says production designer Jeremy Conway, whose task was to recreate the apartment where many memorable moments from the series took place. But one distinctive item from the original set was missing. When the series wrapped, Carrie’s desk had been donated to the Smithsonian in Washington DC. While the designer knew exactly where the desk was, the Smithsonian was not in the habit of returning donated items.

“Sarah Jessica was able to reach out to them and convince them that maybe we could get her desk back just for a little while, while we were filming the project. And that worked out really well.” Conway explains. Items from Carrie’s apartment that could not be found were painstakingly recreated for the film, while Charlotte’s lavish Park Avenue residence was also remade.

“I was really lucky in being able to get a lot of my original crew back,” says Conway. “It was really interesting because as crew members came on who had worked on the show originally, they would remember things – like small details – we might not otherwise have remembered.

But again, Conway was always cognizant of the fact that four years had passed in the characters’ lives when he designed the sets. “Everything was just a little more grown up for all the women,” he says. “And we really focused a lot more on real materials – beautiful wallpapers and linens and the sort of details and textures that you would expect to see.”

“Jeremy’s sense of style, his clean lines – he’s incredibly elegant and chic, and it’s a hyper-reality look in terms of its sense of style,” states producer John Melfi. “Jeremy has a great way of riding the line between the chic elegance of the way we would all want to live, and what’s accessible.”

“Jeremy has done such beautiful work,” adds Sarah Jessica Parker. “I think it’s his best work ever.”

Sex and the City New York added an enormous amount to the series

When Sex and the City debuted on HBO in 1998, few television shows were shot in New York, and the majority were police dramas, which highlighted the rougher side of the city. The New York that Darren Star envisioned for Sex and the City, on the other hand, was inspired more by Woody Allen, and the city the director so beautifully depicted in his films Manhattan and Annie Hall. “They are the definition of great 1970s romantic comedies that took place in New York, and I wanted to carry that tradition a little bit into the series,” says Star. “I wanted to really capture the glamour and the fun and the excitement of New York.”

“New York added an enormous amount to the series,” says Michael Patrick King. “I think New York is America’s cosmopolitan city. So if you’re going into these girls’ lives, and they’re trying to grow up, what better place than the most grown-up city in the world?”

According to King, none of the four girls are from New York. Rather, they each moved to the city in pursuit of their dreams and made the city their own. “And it’s like a dream city because sometimes you feel like it’s focused on you, and you’re having the best time of your life. And then there are other times when you completely disappear, so it’s great for storytelling.”

“New York became the fifth woman of the story,” says Sarah Jessica Parker. “She really became this critical character, integral to the story.”

With that in mind, there was no question that the feature film would be both filmed and set in New York City.

Principal photography on Sex and the City began in New York City on September 19th, 2007, with Michael Patrick King, who also wrote the screenplay, at the helm. Though King had directed numerous episodes of the series, Sex and the City marks his feature film directorial debut.

“It was really fun as a filmmaker to be able to figure out how to tell a bigger story,” says King, who actually found aspects of directing a feature to be easier than the series. “When I was doing the series I would be doing one episode and thinking about seven other episodes. So the ability to just do one story day in and day out was amazing.”

For Sarah Jessica Parker, stepping in front of the cameras to once again star as Carrie Bradshaw felt very natural. “The first day was so familiar that I didn’t even think about it,” she says.

As a producer of the film, Parker was especially appreciative to see that so many of the crew from the series had returned for the film. In fact, eight crew members who had been with the show from the pilot until the last episode were back for the movie.

“Everybody had committed themselves to us in such incredible ways,” says Parker. “And sacrificed time with their children and family. Some of the best memories I ever had professionally were at two or three in the morning, on some crazy unknown street, and still laughing and enjoying each other’s company.”

“We are like a really intense family,” adds Kristin Davis, who plays Carrie’s Park Avenue girlfriend Charlotte. “We have some new additions, and a few people couldn’t join us, but largely most of us are together for the movie.”

Parker had begun her work with Field months prior to filming

As a producer as well as star of the film, Parker had begun her work with Field months prior to filming. “I know how much begging was in order from design houses, and I knew that we were going up be up against Fashion Week, European and American, and what it was going to take to get these clothes from Europe or whichever far flung place,” she explains. “And it’s worth it. It’s been amazing.”

“We have relationships with many designers, based on the success of the TV show,” adds Patricia Field. “The show was very good for fashion. And the designers love to see their clothes on Sarah Jessica, who is a super-model.”

“People have been waiting a while to see these ladies,” Michael Patrick King says. “And when they see these ladies, they’re going to see some color and they’re going to see some new ideas. Pat is at the top of her game.”

Some of the trends seen in the film include belts and stronger shoes, according to Field. “If I had a shoe company, Sarah Jessica would be my model,” says the designer. “Because she just flies off the air, she’s just so graceful. And she’s got beautiful legs.”

Field’s work included over eighty costumes for Sarah Jessica Parker alone, according to producer John Melfi. “Then if you count eighty looks, you’re also talking about accessories, shoes and millions of dollars worth of jewelry,” he says.
“I would estimate that there were well over three hundred changes for these four women,” Field tells it. “And there were many other characters with one or two changes. I never counted up, but I’m sure it was over a thousand costumes. It was monumental.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much time they spent in fittings,” Melfi laughs.
“I find it such a creative process working with Patricia Field,” says Kim Cattrall. “Because there’s such excitement in the room. To come to a costume fitting with someone like Pat Field, where there are at least sixteen, twenty racks of things, it’s just a free-for-all of trying things on. It’s like going to a fabulous trunk show.”

“There were just tables of bags, every new bag that you haven’t seen in the store yet,” adds Kristin Davis. “And there were tables of shoes. It was just like Mecca.”
In addition to dressing the characters for the film, Field also oversaw a recreation of a Fashion Week show in Bryant Park.

Always of utmost importance to Patricia Field is creating a look that will endure. “It’s not about next year’s fashion, or next season. It’s about this movie looking good twenty years from now,” she says. “I just want to make this look gorgeous.”

“I guess in certain houses…fairy tales do come true.” -- Carrie Bradshaw

Field returned to Sex and the City with many of her same staff

On the heels of a failed marriage, Charlotte had an unlikely flirtation with her uncouth yet decent divorce lawyer Harry Goldenblatt, which developed into something more. Evan Handler returns in the role of Harry, who King describes as “the opposite of the preppy dream. Evan is so important because Harry to me had to be literally all heart, and all acceptance. He’s like a peasant king, an easygoing, supportive husband.

Handler also describes Harry as someone with “not all the social graces that Charlotte York was used to,” but was “someone whose spirit and soul she couldn’t resist.”

Meanwhile, Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones took great pride in her liberated attitude toward sex, bedding as many men as suited her. However, she is now in a monogamous committed relationship with Smith Jerrod, played by Jason Lewis.

According Lewis, Smith accepts Samantha for who she is. “What defines him is his openness, his willingness to accept somebody for who they are without judgment.” Smith’s devotion to Samantha was tireless; their sex life was robust, but he also cared for her during her bout with cancer.

Another man in the girls’ lives is Anthony Marentino, played by Mario Cantone, who originally joined the Sex and the City family as Charlotte’s wedding planner. Cantone, who has known Michael Patrick King ever since they both performed as stand-ups at the Improv in the 1980s, credits Sex and the City for dealing with sexual mores in a new and groundbreaking way. “It was never like, ‘oh, he’s gay,’ or ‘she likes to have sex with a lot of men,’ or ‘she’s kind of prudish and neurotic.’ It was all just accepted and presented to the audience so you see it clearly and without judgment. And on top of that, it’s hilarious. You can break through things that are taboo with humor.”

One man who has been constantly at Carrie’s side is Stanford Blatch, a gay talent agent played by Willie Garson. Full of his own romantic dramas with men and offering support as Carrie experiences hers, Stanford is perhaps most memorable for his sartorial style, which includes pointy shoes, shiny suits and bow ties. “Stanford, as a character, was very much created by (costume designer) Pat Field,” says Garson. “It’s the only character where she had carte blanche, whatever she wanted to do. So Pat’s a big personality, Stanford is a big personality.”

“Just your typical day. Breakfast with Balenciaga. Mid-morning coffee with Vivienne Westwood. Lunch with Lacroix…and de la Renta. And for dessert – Karl Lagerfeld” -- Carrie Bradshaw

While the stories of Carrie and her friends’ lives kept audiences laughing and in love with Sex and the City, the characters’ unique sense of style also kept viewers tuning in week after week to have their eyes dazzled by the girls’ wardrobe, as created by costume designer Patricia Field. Throughout the show’s six year run, the downtown fashion icon dressed Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda in everything from designer couture to thrift store finds – always in something unexpected, fresh and sometimes even outrageous.

“Pat Field is indispensable,” states Sarah Jessica Parker. “We could not continue to tell the story without her, period. Her ideas, the breaking of the rules, is infectious.”

“Pat Field is an artist,” says Michael Patrick King. “She’s also incredibly fun to work with because she’s impulsive and collaborative.”

Field returned to Sex and the City with many of her same staff, including co-designer Molly Rogers. “When you work with a crew for so many years, it’s family,” says Field. “So it was great getting back together again.”

However, Field was aware that designing the wardrobe for such familiar characters, celebrated for their style, would not be an easy task. “I had to come up with some kind of action, by which I could follow some philosophy about the movie,” she explains. “And basically, the time that I was concerned about was this four year gap. I think Michael Patrick trusted me to do what was right. And for me, it just had to be intelligent, it had to have a reason. There had to be a logic behind the way they looked, because those girls are a part of everyone’s living room, and they will check it out, detail for detail. So there has to be a real truth there.”

To begin, Field envisioned Carrie as having matured in many ways. “I saw Carrie a little more sexy, a little more evolved, a little more calm with herself as a woman,” says the designer. “She was still going through her eclectic things, and she was gaining in her profession.”

“I think the fashion is really different,” adds Sarah Jessica Parker. “But Carrie is definitely a person that’s older and different, whose tastes have changed, whose palette has changed. And that’s what happens when you grow up. It’s been really exciting.”

Sex and the City one new character stands out: Louise

In addition to the familiar faces returning from the series, one new character stands out: Louise, a young woman Carrie hires to work as her assistant, played by Oscar®-winner Jennifer Hudson. Hudson had not been a regular viewer of Sex and the City, so when she heard about the role of Louise, she happily delved into her research. “And I have not stopped watching it since,” she laughs. “I’m addicted – I’m in love with it.”

When Carrie, newly flush from success as an author, hires Louise to work as her assistant, the young woman proves to be a godsend, bringing some order to Carrie’s rather disorganized life. Hudson describes Louise as family-oriented, and recently relocated to New York. “Louise is a twenty-five year old girl from St. Louis who moves to New York to find love,” she says. “She believes in love. And what greater message is there than to spread love?”

In a show about four single women in New York City, the men in their lives tend to come and go. However, their importance to the story is not to be underestimated. “The men are the unsung heroes of Sex and the City, because without the men to react to there would have been no tide,” explains Michael Patrick King. “There would have been no punch or pull.”

Chris Noth reprises the role of Mr. Big, Carrie’s longtime romantic ideal throughout her various romantic entanglements. During the series, “Mr. Big was the holy grail,” King laughs. “It’s important that Carrie had somebody she couldn’t figure out.” In the film, Mr. Big is, at long last, Carrie’s fiancé.

“Chris is a wonderful, wonderful actor,” King continues. “Something about when he becomes Mr. Big is so compelling that people wanted it to work with Carrie. Or they wanted to punch him. Or they wanted her to get away from him…”

“Men love him,” adds Sarah Jessica Parker. “They’ll say to me, ‘You’re not going to do something awful to Mr. Big, are you? And women of course swoon because he’s that guy. He’s worth every argument, every fight. And there’s just nobody in the world I would have wanted to do this with other than Chris.”

“The chemistry that Sarah Jessica and I had was invaluable,” Chris Noth agrees. “She and I, in playing together and having a simpatico relationship and a certain chemistry, allowed the relationship to go a lot of different places.”

David Eigenberg returns as Steve Brady, Miranda’s husband and the father of her young son. After several unsuccessful relationships, “Steve is the one who got into her heart and was a grownup with her,” King says. “David Eigenberg is authentic. He is New York.”

“Steve is a stand-up guy,” says Eigenberg about his character. “He’ll do anything for the people he loves. Miranda and Steve are two true-blues. They’re a great love story.”

Completing Miranda’s family circle, young Joseph Pupo, no longer a baby, reprises the role of Miranda and Steve’s son, Brady.

Sex and the City Reuniting the creators and cast in a feature film

Reuniting the creators and cast in a feature film seemed a natural next step in the story of the four women. For Sex and the City star and producer Sarah Jessica Parker, there was no question that anyone other than Michael Patrick King would write the story for the film. “Of course there would be nobody else to tell it, I knew he could do it,” she states. “He’s a really gifted romantic comedy writer, and I just felt like I couldn’t do it without him.”

“I got to fall in love with four women for many, many years, and hold them in my heart, even when we weren’t doing the series,” King continues. “I got to be in love with these four women for whom I actually created their voices. It’s rare to get that kind of a love affair going with people.”

The script that King ultimately wrote has a universal theme that touches Carrie, as well as her girlfriends. “The series was really about the search for love,” says King. “And I think the movie’s about what happens when you find it. It’s about women in relationships, and their friendships.”

John Melfi, who was a producer on the series and is also a producer on the feature film, describes the film as posing a question deriving from the classic fairy tale ending: “What is ‘happily ever after?’”

“Some love stories aren’t epic novels – some are short stories. But that doesn’t make them any less filled with love.” -- Carrie Bradshaw

Michael Patrick King’s script for the movie opens up in present day, four years after we last saw Carrie and her friends. And, as happens with time, their lives have all changed.

Still working out of her Upper East Side apartment, Carrie is no longer writing her newspaper column. “She is a sometimes contributor to Vogue,” explains Sarah Jessica Parker about her character. “She’s working on her fourth book – the three previous were best-sellers. So she’s experiencing New York City in a different way. It’s the first time she’s been wise and smart enough and prudent enough to save money. She’s much more of an adult.” Carrie’s new maturity extends to her love life; she is at last in a stable relationship with Mr. Big, played by Chris Noth.

“Sarah Jessica Parker is a phenomenal muse for a writer,” King says. “When you want her to be a star, she’s a star. And yet she also has the ability to be the one who wasn’t chosen. She can do the full range of what people tend to do in life. Sarah Jessica is also really smart; the character would never have worked if she wasn’t able to project that kind of intellect. Other than that, she is hilarious, really sensual and pretty, and with a deep well of emotion.”

Producer John Melfi has high praise for Parker’s abilities both in front of and behind the camera. “She has an absolute ability to be completely in the moment as an actor, and so she can literally jump between roles like I’ve never seen,” Melfi describes. “She can go from Carrie here. Then the camera stops rolling, and she’s focused on being a producer.”

Over on Park Avenue, Charlotte, played by Kristin Davis, is living her dream come true. After years of dreaming of love and motherhood, she and her mensch of a husband Harry (Evan Handler) are proud parents to Lily, a darling little girl they adopted from China. With her newfound happiness comes a change in Charlotte, according to Davis. “Because she has so much of what she wants, she’s kind of focused on other people.”

Surprisingly, Kim Cattrall’s Samantha, who once prided herself on her sexual conquests, is also in a committed relationship, though on the opposite coast. Having bravely battled breast cancer, Samantha has followed her actor boyfriend Smith (Jason Lewis) in his career move to Los Angeles. She now lives in a beautiful beach house in Malibu, but she misses her life back in New York. “Her girlfriends are getting married and having babies,” says Cattrall. “There is that feeling of being left behind, not just distance-wise.”

Back in Brooklyn, Miranda, played by Cynthia Nixon, also feels cut off from her beloved Manhattan. Having settled down with her husband, Steve (David Eigenberg), and their son Brady, Miranda is experiencing the pressures of modern life. “She’s just exhausted,” explains Nixon. “Just like a working mother, she’s extended in five different directions.”

Actress Candice Bergen also returns as Carrie’s chilly editor at Vogue, Enid Frick. “Enid is very, very professional, very careerist,” says Bergen, who played Enid in several episodes of the series. “She’s very devoted to her work, and very much in need of a life outside of her work, I would say,” the actress laughs. Bergen’s working relationship with Michael Patrick King dates from her hit comedy series Murphy Brown, where King started his writing career. “I love Michael so much,” she says. “It’s always a pleasure to get to work with him.”

Sex and the City, its audience had grown exponentially with new fans

In writing for the series, King concentrated on developing the characters of the four women. He offers, “Miranda’s the sarcastic, sort of angry, one. Charlotte’s the sweeter, sort of preppy one, the more traditional one. Samantha’s the sexy, sort of power-hungry one. And then, there’s Carrie, the indefinable one. From there, everything grew. You figure out their sense of humor, on and off screen. And then each year of the series we became more and more connected, like a relationship, as the girls grew and the relationships between the actresses and the writers and directors grew.”

Once the series began to air on HBO, audiences fell in love with Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, and discussions about the previous night’s episode became regular water cooler talk all over America.

“It was not at all what any of us expected,” says Kristin Davis, who reprises the role of Charlotte. “You never expect something to be as successful and go for as long as we got to go. We had just a really incredible time.”

“The success of the show stemmed from a lot of things,” adds Cynthia Nixon, who again plays Miranda. “It starts with the writing. It’s really clever and heartfelt writing. People watch the show over and over, the same episode five, ten times because it’s so jam-packed full of content. Not just jokes – ideas. And I think the actors are wonderful.”

“It was about women joining together as the new family, girlfriends sticking together through thick and thin” adds Kim Cattrall, who returns as Samantha. “And those relationships are what made the show so popular.”

“The show was successful because there was a void that needed to be filled,” adds Michael Patrick King. “And that was, someone had to speak out for single women, someone going through life alone in a society that says everybody should be together. And then in the show, subliminally and sometimes not so subliminally, is the other voice that is saying, ‘Be smart, strong! Follow your own road!’”
By the time Sex and the City ended its run on HBO, its audience had grown exponentially with new fans discovering the series on DVD and in syndication.

In 2004, the series aired its last original episode, preceded by a media blitz befitting its huge following and its place in the cultural lexicon. Even those with only a passing knowledge of the show knew that it featured independent, smart, sophisticated, single women with a taste for Manolo strappy sandals, Magnolia Bakery cupcakes and the crispest Cosmopolitans that the newest Big Apple hot spots had to offer.

Sex and the City About The Production

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), successful author and everyone’s favorite fashion icon-next-door, is back, her famously sardonic wit intact and sharper than ever, as she continues to narrate her own story about sex, love and the fashion-obsessed single woman in New York City. Sex and the City finds Carrie, Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) four years after the hit HBO series ended, as our favorite femmes fashionables continue to juggle jobs, friendships and relationships while they start to navigate motherhood, marriage and Manhattan real estate…some of them may even – brace yourself – brave other boroughs outside Manhattan.

Strap on your Manolos and grab a cupcake and a Cosmopolitan. Those four fabulous New Yorkers – Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte – are back and coming to the big screen in the feature film Sex and the City, based on one of the most talked about series of all time.

The series Sex and the City debuted in 1998 on HBO and ran for six illustrious seasons before the finale in 2004. The series earned 50 Emmy nominations during its run, winning seven, including acting nods for Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon. The series also won 2 Screen Actors Guild Awards for Best Ensemble in a Comedy Series and was nominated for 24 Golden Globes, winning eight, including Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy and acting awards for Parker and Kim Cattrall.

But before it hit the small screen, Sex and the City was a series of autobiographical newspaper columns in The New York Observer by author Candace Bushnell. Darren Star, the creator and executive producer of such iconic television shows as “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Melrose Place,” saw immediate potential in Bushnell’s writings about sexual politics among New York’s social set. “I read those articles and I thought, ‘wow, this is a great window into New York,’” Star recalls. “I just loved the character of a single woman who is writing about herself and exploring the city and the nature of relationships at the same time.” Bushnell later compiled her columns into a book, which became a bestseller when it was published in 1996.

With the start of the series, Star also asked Michael Patrick King, the man who would go on to executive produce the series as well as eventually write and direct the feature film, to join the series as a writer and as co-executive producer. “Darren knew that Michael brought something that was very unique in terms of his skills as a writer,” says Sarah Jessica Parker, who returns in the role of Carrie and also serves as a producer on the film. “That was just our good fortune and Darren’s smarts.”

Changeling. In the film, Christine Collins’ (Jolie) prayers are met when her kidnapped son is returned

CHANGELING

Genre: Thriller
Cast: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan,
Colm Feore, Amy Ryan, Michael Kelly
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by: J. Michael Straczynski
Producers: Clint Eastwood, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard,
Robert Lorenz
Executive Producers: Tim Moore, Jim Whitaker


Clint Eastwood directs Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich in a provocative thriller based on actual events: Changeling. In the film, Christine Collins’ (Jolie) prayers are met when her kidnapped son is returned. But amidst the frenzy of the photo-op reunion, she realizes this child is not hers. Facing corrupt police and a skeptical public, she desperately hunts for answers, only to be confronted by a truth that will change her forever.

Los Angeles, 1928: On a Saturday morning in a working-class suburb, Christine said goodbye to her son, Walter, and left for work. When she came home, she discovered he had vanished. A fruitless search ensues, and months later, a boy claiming to be the nine-year-old is returned. Dazed by the swirl of cops, reporters and her conflicted emotions, Christine allows him to stay overnight. But in her heart, she knows he is not Walter.

As she pushes authorities to keep looking, she learns that in Prohibition-era L.A., women don’t challenge the system and live to tell their story. Slandered as delusional and unfit, Christine finds an ally in activist Reverend Briegleb (Malkovich), who helps her fight the city to look for her missing boy. Based on the actual incident that rocked California’s legal system, Changeling tells the shocking tale of a mother’s quest to find her son, and those who won’t stop until they silence her.

DEBORAH HOPPER (Costume Designer) has worked with filmmaker Clint Eastwood for more than 20 years

DEBORAH HOPPER (Costume Designer) has worked with filmmaker Clint Eastwood for more than 20 years, most recently serving as the costume designer on his films Space Cowboys, Blood Work, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. Most recently, Hopper designed for the drama Rails & Ties, directed by Alison Eastwood.

Hopper began her association with Eastwood as the women’s costume supervisor on the 1984 film Tightrope, which Eastwood produced and starred in. She held the same post on the films Pale Rider, Heartbreak Ridge, Bird, The Dead Pool, Pink Cadillac and The Rookie, before overseeing all costumes as the costume supervisor on Eastwood’s Absolute Power, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and True Crime.

Earlier in her career, Hopper was awarded an Emmy Award for her work as a women’s costumer on Shakedown on the Sunset Strip, a telefilm set in the 1950s. Her other credits as either as costume supervisor or women’s costume supervisor include the films Mulholland Falls, Showgirls, Chaplin, Exit to Eden, Strange Days, Dear God and Basic Instinct, among others.

GARY ROACH (Co-Editor) has worked with Clint Eastwood since 1996

GARY ROACH (Co-Editor) has worked with Clint Eastwood since 1996. Beginning as an apprentice on Absolute Power, Roach quickly moved up to assistant editor on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Fitting comfortably into Eastwood’s small, efficient editing crew, Roach continued as an assistant editor on True Crime, Space Cowboys, Blood Work, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and Flags of our Fathers. In between productions for Malpaso, Roach found time to work as an assistant editor on Catwoman for Warner Bros. Roach received his first co-editor credit on the Eastwood-directed Piano Blues, a segment of The Blues documentary series produced by Martin Scorsese.

Roach has continued his work on documentaries, most recently co-editing a film about Tony Bennett called The Music Never Ends. Academy Award®-nominated Letters From Iwo Jima was Roach’s first editor credit, which he shared with longtime Eastwood collaborator Joel Cox. With the directorial debut of Alison Eastwood’s Rails & Ties, Roach received his first sole editor credit.

JOEL COX (Editor) has worked with Clint Eastwood for more than 30 years

JOEL COX (Edited by) has worked with Clint Eastwood for more than 30 years, most recently on the companion World War II dramas, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. Other standout credits include the films Million Dollar Baby, for which he earned an Academy Award® nomination; Mystic River; Blood Work; Space Cowboys; True Crime; Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; Absolute Power; The Bridges of Madison County; A Perfect World; and Unforgiven, for which he won an Academy Award® for Best Editor.

Cox has spent his entire career at Warner Bros., most notably on Eastwood’s films. The relationship began in 1975 when Cox worked as a assistant editor on The Outlaw Josey Wales. Since then, Cox has cut 20 more films that have, in some combination either starred, been produced or directed by Clint Eastwood.

Cox’s credits as co-editor with his mentor, noted editor Ferris Webster, include The Enforcer, The Gauntlet, Every Which Way But Loose, Escape from Alcatraz, Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man.

Sudden Impact was Cox’s first film as editor, a title he has held ever since, including credits on Tightrope, Pale Rider, Heartbreak Ridge, Bird, The Dead Pool, Pink Cadillac, White Hunter Black Heart and The Rookie.

JAMES J. MURAKAMI (Production Designer) was the production designer on Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima

JAMES J. MURAKAMI (Production Designer) was the production designer on Clint Eastwood’s acclaimed World War II drama Letters From Iwo Jima. He had previously collaborated with Eastwood’s longtime production designer Henry Bumstead, first as a set designer on Unforgiven and later as an art director on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. He most recently designed Rails & Ties for director Alison Eastwood.

In 2005, Murakami won an Emmy Award for his work as an art director on the acclaimed HBO series Deadwood. He had earned his first Emmy Award nomination for his art direction on the series western the year prior.

Murakami’s many feature film credits as an art director include the Tony Scott films Enemy of the State, Crimson Tide, True Romance and Beverly Hills Cop II; David Fincher’s The Game; Peter Hyams’ The Relic; Martin Brest’s Midnight Run and Beverly Hills Cop; Barry Levinson’s The Natural (for which he shared an Academy Award® nomination for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration); and John Badham’s WarGames. He has also served as a set designer on such films as The Scorpion King, The Princess Diaries, The Postman, Head Above Water, I Love Trouble and Sneakers.

TOM STERN (Director of Photography) most recently lensed Alison Eastwood’s directorial debut Rails & Ties

TOM STERN (Director of Photography) most recently lensed Alison Eastwood’s directorial debut Rails & Ties, Christophe Barratier’s Faubourg 36, Things We Lost in the Fire and Tenderness. He is currently shooting Pavel Lungin’s Ivan the Terrible in Russia.

His most recent collaboration with director Clint Eastwood include the companion World War II dramas, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. He also served as the cinematographer on the Eastwood-directed films Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and Blood Work, which marked Stern’s first film as a director of photography.
Stern’s collaborations with other directors include Tony Goldwyn’s The Last Kiss, John Turturro’s Romance & Cigarettes, Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Rowdy Herrington’s Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius.

A 30-year industry veteran, Stern has worked with Clint Eastwood for more than two decades, going back to when Stern was a gaffer on such films as Honkytonk Man, Sudden Impact, Tightrope, Pale Rider and Heartbreak Ridge. Becoming the chief lighting technician at Malpaso Productions, he worked on a wide range of films, including Eastwood’s The Rookie, Unforgiven, A Perfect World, True Crime and Space Cowboys. As a chief lighting technician, he also teamed with other directors, including Michael Apted on Class Action, and Sam Mendes on American Beauty and Road to Perdition, among others.

JIM WHITAKER (Executive Producer) is the president of motion picture production at Imagine Entertainment

JIM WHITAKER (Executive Producer) is the president of motion picture production at Imagine Entertainment. He recently executive produced American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe; Friday Night Lights, starring Billy Bob Thornton; and Flight Plan, starring Jodie Foster. He also co-executive produced Ron Howard’s film Cinderella Man, starring Academy Award® winners Russell Crowe and Renée Zellweger. He is also the founder and director of Project Rebirth, a nonprofit organization that is chronicling the reconstruction of Ground Zero along with the healing process of 10 people affected by September 11.

Whitaker’s passion for filmmaking first emerged during his undergraduate years at Georgetown. In 1987, he went to work in Baltimore doing craft services on John Waters’ cult hit, Hairspray. In 1988, he served as an intern at the local NBC affiliate and traveled to the Democratic and Republican conventions, working as a stringer for Katie Couric, a local reporter at the time. In 1989 and 1990, he directed several films to raise money for nonprofit organizations including Best Buddies and Rebuilding Together.

Upon graduation, Whitaker joined the independent production company Hillman & Carr, where he edited documentaries for museums. He also conceived, rose financing for and directed an award-winning public service announcement against drunk driving. In 1991, Whitaker moved to Los Angeles where he entered the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California, earning a master’s degree in fine arts.

During his graduate studies, Whitaker accepted an internship position at Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment. Upon graduation from USC, he was awarded a full-time position as a creative associate with the company. Whitaker rose through the ranks to become president of motion picture production, supervising the development and production of several major motion pictures including 8 Mile; Nutty Professor II: The Klumps; Life; Flight Plan; and Curious George. He is currently in preproduction on Nottingham, starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ridley Scott. Born the youngest of five boys in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1968, Whitaker spent his early years in the Washington, D.C. area before moving to the small town of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. He returned to Washington, D.C., for his senior year of high school and graduated from Georgetown Preparatory School in 1986. Whitaker graduated from Georgetown University with honors in 1990 with a bachelor of arts degree in economics.

Whitaker currently resides in Los Angeles, California with his wife, Chris, daughter, Rebecca and son, Emmett.

TIM MOORE has overseen the physical production of Clint Eastwood’s last four films

TIM MOORE (Executive Producer & Unit Production Manager) has overseen the physical production of Clint Eastwood’s last four films: Mystic River, which earned six Oscar® nominations, including one for Best Picture; Million Dollar Baby, which won four Academy Awards®, including Best Picture; and the dual World War II epics Flags of Our Fathers and the award-winning Letters From Iwo Jima, which was also Oscar®-nominated for Best Picture. Moore also served as the co-producer on Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. He most recently served as co-producer on Alison Eastwood’s directorial debut, Rails & Ties.

Moore has also worked several times with director Rowdy Herrington over the last two decades, most recently producing the ESPY-nominated biopic Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius. Their earlier collaborations include the films A Murder of Crows, Road House and Jack’s Back.

Moore’s additional producing credits include Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory, starring Willem Dafoe, and Arne Glimcher’s The White River Kid. For television, Moore was the production manager on the telefilm Semper Fi and produced the telefilm Stolen From the Heart.

Before starting his film career, Moore attended UCLA, where he met fraternity brother John Shepherd. The two have gone on to produce four independent features together: Eye of the Storm, The Ride, The Climb and Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius.
Moore and his wife, Bobbe, are actively engaged in a number of animal rescue organizations.

ROBERT LORENZ has worked alongside filmmaker Clint Eastwood for almost 14 years

ROBERT LORENZ (Produced by) has worked alongside filmmaker Clint Eastwood for almost 14 years. He currently oversees all aspects of the motion pictures produced at Eastwood’s company, Malpaso Productions, encompassing development, production, marketing and distribution.
In 2007, Lorenz received an Academy Award® nomination for his work on Eastwood’s acclaimed World War II saga Letters From Iwo Jima, which he produced with Eastwood and Steven Spielberg. The companion film to Flags of Our Fathers and shot almost entirely in Japanese, Letters From Iwo Jima also won the Los Angeles Film Critics and National Board of Review Awards for Best Picture, and the Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Lorenz had earlier garnered an Oscar® nomination as a producer of Eastwood’s Mystic River. In addition, he served as an executive producer on the Academy Award®-winning Best Picture Million Dollar Baby and Blood Work.

Lorenz grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and began his film career in Los Angeles in 1989. In 1994, he started his association with Eastwood as an assistant director on The Bridges of Madison County. Their subsequent collaborations include Space Cowboys, True Crime, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Absolute Power.

Lorenz has more than 25 films to his credit. He has been a member of the Directors Guild of America since 1993 and the Producers Guild of America since 2005. Lorenz met his wife, Melissa, while working with her on The Bridges of Madison County. They presently live in the Los Angeles area with their two children.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker RON HOWARD is one of this generation’s most popular directors

Academy Award®-winning filmmaker RON HOWARD (Produced by) is one of this generation’s most popular directors. From the critically acclaimed dramas A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13 to the hit comedies Parenthood and Splash, he has created some of Hollywood’s most memorable films. Most recently, he directed the big screen adaptation of the international bestseller “The Da Vinci Code,” starring Oscar® winner Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Sir Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Jean Reno and Paul Bettany. Prior to The Da Vinci Code, Howard directed and produced Cinderella Man starring Russell Crowe, with whom he previously collaborated on A Beautiful Mind, for which Howard earned an Oscar® for Best Director and which also won awards for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress. The film garnered four Golden Globes as well, including the award for Best Motion Picture Drama. Additionally, Howard won Best Director of the Year from the Directors Guild of America. Howard and producer Brian Grazer received the first annual Awareness Award from the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign for their work on the film.
Howard’s skill as a director has long been recognized. In 1995, he received his first Best Director of the Year award from the DGA for Apollo 13. The true-life drama also garnered nine Academy Award® nominations, winning Oscars® for Best Film Editing and Best Sound. It also received Best Ensemble Cast and Best Supporting Actor awards from the Screen Actors Guild. Many of Howard’s past films have received nods from the Academy, including the popular hits Backdraft, Parenthood and Cocoon, the last of which took home two Oscars®. Howard was honored by the Museum of the Moving Image in December 2005, and by the American Cinema Editors in February 2006.

Howard recently completed production on the film adaptation of Peter Morgan’s critically acclaimed play Frost/Nixon, and is in preproduction on the big-screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s best-selling novel “Angels & Demons.”

Howard’s portfolio includes some of the most popular films of the past 20 years. In 1991, Howard created the acclaimed drama Backdraft, starring Robert De Niro, Kurt Russell and William Baldwin. He followed it with the historical epic Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Howard directed Mel Gibson, Rene Russo, Gary Sinise and Delroy Lindo in the 1996 suspense thriller Ransom. He worked with Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise and Kathleen Quinlan on Apollo 13, which was re-released recently in the IMAX format. Howard’s other films include the blockbuster Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, starring Jim Carrey; Parenthood, starring Steve Martin; the fantasy epic Willow; Night Shift, starring Henry Winkler, Michael Keaton and Shelley Long; and the suspenseful western, The Missing, starring Oscar® winners Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones. Howard has also served as an executive producer on a number of award-winning films and television shows, such as the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, and Fox’s Emmy Award winner for Best Comedy, Arrested Development, which he also narrated.

Howard and long-time producing partner Brian Grazer first collaborated on the hit comedies Night Shift and Splash. The pair co-founded Imagine Entertainment in 1986 to create independently produced feature films. The company has since produced a variety of popular feature films, including such hits as The Nutty Professor, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Bowfinger, The Paper, Inventing the Abbotts and Liar Liar. Howard made his directorial debut in 1978 with the comedy Grand Theft Auto.
Howard began his career in film as an actor. He first appeared in The Journey and The Music Man, then as Opie on the long-running television series The Andy Griffith Show. Howard later starred in the popular series Happy Days and drew favorable reviews for his performances in American Graffiti and The Shootist.

Producer BRIAN GRAZER has been making movies and television programs for more than 25 years

Producer BRIAN GRAZER (Produced by) has been making movies and television programs for more than 25 years. He most recently produced Ridley Scott’s box-office smash American Gangster, with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, and recently completed production on the big-screen adaptation of Peter Morgan’s award-winning play Frost/Nixon, starring Frank Langella and Michael Sheen.

As both a writer and producer, he has been personally nominated for three Academy Awards®, and in 2002, he won the Best Picture Oscar® for A Beautiful Mind. In addition to winning three other Academy Awards®, A Beautiful Mind also won four Golden Globe Awards (including Best Motion Picture Drama) and earned Grazer the first annual Awareness Award from the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign.

Over the years, Grazer’s films and TV shows have been nominated for a total of 44 Oscars® and 91 Emmys. At the same time, his movies have generated more than $13 billion in worldwide theatrical, music and video grosses. Reflecting this combination of commercial and artistic achievement, the Producers Guild of America honored Grazer with the David O. Selznick Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. His accomplishments have also been recognized by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which, in 1998, added Grazer to the short list of producers with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On March 6, 2003, ShoWest celebrated Grazer’s success by honoring him with its Lifetime Achievement Award. On November 14, 2005, the Fulfillment Fund honored Grazer in Los Angeles. In May 2007, Grazer was chosen by Time magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.”

In addition to A Beautiful Mind, Grazer’s films include Apollo 13, for which Grazer won the Producers Guild’s Daryl F. Zanuck Motion Picture Producer of the Year Award as well as an Oscar® nomination for Best Picture of 1995; and Splash, which he co-wrote as well as produced and for which he received an Oscar® nomination for Best Original Screenplay of 1986.

Other feature film credits include the big-screen adaptation of the international bestseller “The Da Vinci Code,” starring Tom Hanks, and directed by Oscar® winner Ron Howard; the tense drama The Inside Man, directed by Spike Lee and starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster; Flightplan; Cinderella Man; the Sundance-acclaimed documentary Inside Deep Throat; Friday Night Lights; 8 Mile; Blue Crush; Intolerable Cruelty; Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas; The Nutty Professor; Liar, Liar; Ransom; My Girl; Backdraft; Kindergarten Cop; Parenthood; Clean and Sober; and Spies Like Us.

Grazer’s television productions include FOX’s hit, Emmy Award-winning Best Drama Series 24; NBC’s Friday Night Lights, pilot directed by Peter Berg; and CBS’s Shark, pilot directed by Spike Lee and staring James Woods. His additional television credits include FOX’s Emmy Award-winning Best Comedy Arrested Development, NBC’s Miss Match, WB’s Felicity, ABC’s Sports Night, as well as HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, for which he won the Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries.

Grazer began his career as a producer developing television projects. It was while he was executive producing TV pilots for Paramount Pictures in the early 1980s that Grazer first met his longtime friend and business partner Ron Howard. Their collaboration began in 1985 with the hit comedies Night Shift and Splash, and in 1986, the two founded Imagine Entertainment, which they continue to run together as co-chairmen.

Screenwriter J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI is currently rewriting The Grays for Wolfgang Peterson and Sony Pictures

Screenwriter J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI (Screenplay by) was born in New Jersey but raised all across the United States, moving over 20 times in his first 17 years. He began selling articles and short stories by the time he graduated high school, and spent the next 14 years as a journalist, writing for the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Magazine, Penthouse, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the Los Angeles Reader and Time, Inc. In the course of that work he also picked up two bachelor degrees from San Diego State University in clinical psychology and sociology, with minors in literature and philosophy.

In 1986, Straczynski jumped ship from journalism to television, starting first in animation then moving on to write for such series as The Twilight Zone; Murder She Wrote; Jake and the Fatman; Walker, Texas Ranger; Crusade, Showtime Network’s Jeremiah; and Nightmare Classics, for which he received a Writers Guild Award nomination. He also created and executive produced the double Hugo Award-winning series Babylon 5, for which he wrote 91 out of 110 produced episodes, and received the E Pluribus Unum Award from the American Cinema Foundation, two technical Emmy awards, the Saturn award, the Ray Bradbury Award and many others. In 2006, he wrote, produced and directed Babylon 5: A Call to Arms, a direct-to-DVD short film for Warner Bros.

Straczynski also writes for Marvel Comics, including “The Amazing Spider-Man” (since 2001), “Fantastic Four,” “Thor,” “Bullet Points,” “Dream Police” and “The Book of Lost Souls.” His comic work has received the prestigious Eisner Award and the Inkpot Lifetime Achievement Award.

After finishing Jeremiah, Straczynski dedicated himself to film work. In addition to the production of L’Échange, he has adapted World War Z for Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and Paramount Pictures; They Marched Into Sunlight for Tom Hanks’ Playtone and Universal Pictures, with Paul Greengrass attached to direct; a new Silver Surfer feature for 20th Century Fox; and rewriting Ninja Assassin for the Wachowski Brothers and Joel Silver, now in production. He is currently rewriting The Grays for Wolfgang Peterson and Sony Pictures, has sold two more spec scripts—Proving Ground to United Artists and Tom Cruise and The Flickering Light to Imagine Entertainment and Ron Howard, for whom he has also just signed to adapt the famous science fiction novel series, The Lensman.

CLINT EASTWOOD continues to produce award-winning pictures

After more than 30 years as a filmmaker, CLINT EASTWOOD (Directed by/Produced by/Music by) continues to produce award-winning pictures. Most recently earning dual Academy Award® nominations in the categories of Best Director and Best Picture for his acclaimed World War II drama Letters From Iwo Jima, which tells the story of the historic battle from the Japanese perspective. In addition, the film won the Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice awards for Best Foreign Language Film, and also received Best Picture honors from a number of film critics groups, including the Los Angeles Film Critics and the National Board of Review. Letters From Iwo Jima is the companion film to Eastwood’s widely praised drama Flags of Our Fathers, which tells the story of the American men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima in the famed photograph.

In 2005, Eastwood received the Academy Awards® for Best Picture and Best Director—his second in both categories—for Million Dollar Baby. The film also earned Oscars® for Hilary Swank (Best Actress) and Morgan Freeman (Best Supporting Actor) and nominations for three more (Best Actor for Eastwood, Best Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay). In 2003, Eastwood’s critically acclaimed drama Mystic River debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, earning him a Golden Palm nomination and the Golden Coach Award. Mystic River went on to earn six Academy Award® nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay), winning two Oscars® (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor). In 1993, Eastwood’s foreboding, revisionist western, Unforgiven, received nine Academy Award® nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Editor and Best Sound), and went on to win four Oscars® (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Editor). Eastwood also received the Academy’s Irving Thalberg Memorial Award in 1995.

The Golden Globes first honored Eastwood in 1971 with the Henrietta Award for World Film Favorite. In 1988, he was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award. The following year, he was honored with the Golden Globe Award for Best Director for Bird and in 1993, he was awarded Best Director for Unforgiven. Nominated in 2004 for his direction of Mystic River, Eastwood took home his third Best Director Golden Globe Award in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby. He was also nominated in 2005 for his score to that film.

In addition to the Thalberg Award and DeMille Award, Eastwood’s many other lifetime career achievement awards include honors from the Directors Guild of America, the Producers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild, the American Film Institute and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the French Film Society, the National Board of Review, the Henry Mancini Institute (Hank Award for distinguished service to American music) and the Hamburg Film Festival (Douglas Sirk Award). He is also the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor, awards from the American Cinema Editors and the Publicists’ Guild, an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Wesleyan University and is a five-time winner of Favorite Motion Picture Actor from the People’s Choice Awards. In 1991, Eastwood was Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatrical Society’s Man of the Year and in 1992, he received the California Governor’s Award for the Arts.

No stranger to the Cannes Film Festival, Eastwood served as president of the jury in 1994 and has garnered Palme D’Or nominations for White Hunter Black Heart in 1990, Bird in 1988 (which won for Best Actor and Best Sound) and Pale Rider in 1985.

MICHAEL KELLY stars in the much-anticipated upcoming HBO miniseries Generation Kill

With an expansive list of film and television credits spanning over 10 years, MICHAEL KELLY (Detective Lester Ybarra) stars in the much-anticipated upcoming HBO miniseries Generation Kill, premiering this July, which chronicles one Marine’s journey in the American-led assault on Baghdad in 2003. Kelly will also be seen in the feature film The Narrows, directed by François Velle later this year.

In 2006, Kelly starred in Invincible opposite Mark Wahlberg. Kelly’s other feature film credits include the Universal Pictures blockbuster Dawn of the Dead, directed by Zach Snyder; Tenderness, starring Russell Crowe; Broken English, written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes and nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival; and Loggerheads, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Kelly also appeared in M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon and River Red (Sundance Film Festival).

On television, Kelly most recently played the recurring role of FBI Agent Ron Goddard on The Sopranos, and was a series regular on the USA Network television series Kojak, with Ving Rhames and Chazz Palminteri, and the UPN action drama, Level 9. He has also guest-starred on numerous hit television shows, including Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order, CSI: Miami, The Shield, Judging Amy, The Jury and Third Watch.

A lifetime member of The Actor’s Studio, Kelly has performed in such plays as Arthur Penn’s production of Major Crimes, Theatre Studio’s Miss Julie and a production of In Search of Strindberg, staged in Stockholm, Sweden.

Kelly resides in New York City.

Academy Award® nominee AMY RYAN (Carol Dexter) has made her mark working with some of today’s top directors

Academy Award® nominee AMY RYAN (Carol Dexter) has made her mark working with some of today’s top directors and talent in the industry. Between many high-profile stage projects and television roles such as HBO’s The Wire, Ryan is still just getting started.

Ryan hit the big screen in October 2007 in Miramax’s Gone Baby Gone. Directed by Ben Affleck, Ryan co-stars with Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris in a breakout performance as a Boston mother whose child is kidnapped. The film has received rave reviews, particularly for Ryan’s standout performance. Most notably, Ryan received Academy Award®, Golden Globe and SAG award nominations for her performance in the Best Supporting Actress categories. Additionally, she won Best Supporting Actress awards from the Broadcast Film Critics Association (Critics’ Choice Awards), New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Board of Review and the Boston Society of Film Critics, Washington, D.C. Area Film Critics Association and San Francisco Film Critics Circle Awards.

Ryan also appeared in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead with Ethan Hawke and directed by Sidney Lumet. Ryan was a part of Best Ensemble awards for this film from the Gotham Awards, New York Film Critics Online and the Boston Society of Film Critics, and she received a Best Supporting Actress award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The cast was also nominated for a Broadcast Film Critics Association Critics’ Choice Award.

Following these two acclaimed performances, Ryan recently completed filming Paul Greengrass’ adaptation of the novel “The Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” opposite Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as well as two independent films due out in 2008: Bob Funk, by writer/director Craig Carlisle and The Missing Person, by writer Noah Buschel.

Through her steady film career, Ryan has worked with some of today’s top directors in a number of extremely noted films such as Keane, directed by Lodge Kerrigan; Capote, by Bennet Miller; and War of the Worlds, directed by Steven Spielberg. She also appeared in Dan in Real Life with Steve Carell, directed by Peter Hedges.

In addition to her film credits, Ryan has been quite a success on the Broadway stage. In 2000, she was nominated for her first Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in the Broadway hit Uncle Vanya. A few years later, she astounded critics with a moving portrayal of the character Stella, and was nominated again for Best Featured Actress opposite John C. Reilly in A Streetcar Named Desire. She also starred in Neil LaBute’s play The Distance from Here in London’s West End.

Ryan’s television credits are extensive, with over 30 guest-star performances and over eight series-regular or recurring characters on primetime television shows.

JASON BUTLER HARNER is a relatively new face to film

JASON BUTLER HARNER (Gordon Northcott) is a relatively new face to film, having been seen in Universal Pictures’ The Good Shepherd, which starred Angelina Jolie and Matt Damon. He appeared most recently in the HBO miniseries John Adams, opposite Paul Giamatti and in the action film Next, opposite Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore.

Upcoming projects include the independent film New Orleans, Mon Amour, directed by Michael Almareyda and starring Christopher Eccleston, as well as in Tony Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, which is based on Morton Freedgood’s thriller novel and stars John Travolta and Denzel Washington.

Harner’s television credits include a number of guest-starring roles including FOX’s much-anticipated J.J. Abrams pilot, Fringe.

The bulk of Harner’s career has been on the stage where New York audiences recognize him as a constant presence on and off-Broadway, most notably in the 2007 American premiere of Tom Stoppard’s nine-hour landmark trilogy The Coast of Utopia, which set a record in receiving seven Tony Awards (the most Tony awards ever received by a play). Harner played Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev alongside such talents as Billy Crudup, Martha Plimpton, Ethan Hawke, and Amy Irving. Fortunate enough to have worked extensively across the country on new material and classical, he has collaborated with award- winning directors and acted intimately with Sally Field, Annette Bening, Alfred Molina, James Cromwell and Amy Ryan, to name a few.

Other theater credits of interest include a controversial interpretation of Hedda Gabler at the New York Theatre Workshop (for which he won an Obie Award); a highly-lauded production of The Glass Menagerie at The Kennedy Center; The Cherry Orchard at the Mark Taper Forum; The Paris Letter at the Roundabout (for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award); the title role in Hamlet (Dallas Theatre Center); the American premiere of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love; Macbeth at the Public Theater with Alec Baldwin and Angela Bassett; and Craig Wright’s emotionally-wrenching examination of infidelity, Orange Flower Water.

Born in a small town, and raised in the suburbs, Harner has lived in New York City for the past 14 years.

COLM FEORE is a veteran talent

COLM FEORE (Chief James E. Davis) is a veteran talent with a distinguished catalogue of work. Feore’s talent crosses many borders: an international success story, he acts in both English and French and has conquered many mediums, with starring roles in film, television and on stage. Feore recently co-starred in the hit film Bon Cop, Bad Cop, the highest-grossing Canadian film of all time.

Feore will be seen next in the upcoming season of FOX’s hit drama 24, as first husband to the new president, and can currently be seen on the CBC miniseries Guns. On the Canadian big screen, he will be seen next in a Kevin Tierney-produced project entitled Serveuses demandées and in Le Pèige Américain, a feature film about Lucien Rivard, who became a leader of the Canadian drug trade in the 1940s, which will be directed by Charles Binamé.

Feore has a string of roles working with high-profile filmmakers including Julie Taymor’s Titus; Michael Mann’s Oscar®-nominated The Insider; John Woo’s blockbuster Face/Off; Sidney Lumet’s Night Falls on Manhattan; François Girard’s The Red Violin; and Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, among others.

Feore’s other motion picture credits include the Academy Award® winner for Best Picture, Chicago, which also won the 2003 SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by the Cast of a Theatrical Motion Picture; The Chronicles of Riddick; The Exorcism of Emily Rose; Paycheck; The Sum of All Fears; François Girard’s biopic, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which won the Genie Award for Best Picture and earned him a nomination for his performance; City of Angels, opposite Meg Ryan; the dark comedy Critical Care; Airborne; The Wrong Guy; Iron Eagle II; Bethune: The Making of a Hero, starring Donald Sutherland; Beautiful Dreamers; and Truman.

Though he was born in the U.S. and spent the first years of his life in Ireland, Feore and his family moved to Ottawa when he was three and Canada became his official home. After studying acting at National Theatre School of Canada, Feore built a distinguished Canadian stage career, performing in over 40 productions during 13 seasons with the prestigious Stratford Festival.

In 2000, he appeared in the New York Public Theater production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In 2005, Feore starred with Denzel Washington and received widespread critical acclaim for his portrayal of Cassius in the Broadway performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The power of his performance earned him the St. Clair Bayfield Award, denoting the best performance by an actor in a Shakespearean play in the New York metropolitan area.

His list of small-screen movie credentials is as long as it is varied, ranging from historical roles in Nuremburg, Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, The Day Reagan Was Shot, And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, Empire and Trudeau—for which he won the 2002 Monte Carlo Television Festival Award for Best Actor and the 2002 Gemini Award for Best Actor in a Mini Series—to classic dramas including Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew. Feore has also had many roles in such successful contemporary shows as The West Wing, Boston Public and the Canadian miniseries Slings & Arrows II, a look behind the scenes at the chaotic world of theater.

JEFFREY DONOVAN stars as Michael Westen in the hit USA Network original series Burn Notice

JEFFREY DONOVAN (Captain J.J. Jones) stars as Michael Westen in the hit USA Network original series Burn Notice, which returns for season two this summer.

Renowned for his versatility and striking presence, Donovan has made a name for himself through memorable performances on both stage and screen. Last year, he was seen on the big screen as a captivating leading man in the Joey Lauren Adams film Come Early Morning. Written and directed by Adams, the film premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Donovan received high praise for his performance as Cal, the romantic lead opposite Ashley Judd. The Roadside Attractions film also stars Laura Prepon.

Donovan also starred as Jim Keith in the independent film Believe in Me, an adaptation of the young-adult novel “Brief Garland,” by Harold Keith. Directed by Robert Collector, the film follows the true story of Keith, a high school girl’s basketball coach in the 1960s, who gets inspired by his young team and who in turn, inspires them to greatness. The film also stars Bruce Dern, Samantha Mathis and Heather Matarazzo.

Donovan last appeared on the big screen in a memorable cameo in the blockbuster romantic comedy Hitch, opposite Will Smith. Other film credits include Barry Levinson’s Sleepers, Purpose, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and Bait. Donovan made his feature film debut in Throwing Down, which won the grand prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

In 2004, Donovan earned critical acclaim for his starring role as Detective David Creegan in the USA Network original series Touching Evil. His television credits include HBO’s original film When Trumpets Fade; recurring roles on Crossing Jordan, Spin City, The Beat and The Pretender; and notable guest appearances in Monk, CSI: Miami, Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street.

JOHN MALKOVICH is one of the most compelling presences in cinema

JOHN MALKOVICH (Reverend Gustav Briegleb) is one of the most compelling presences in cinema with a 20-year body of work marked with acclaimed performances in thought-provoking independents as well as mainstream movies. As a guiding member of Chicago’s landmark Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Malkovich as a producer, director and actor has had a profound impact on the American theater landscape. That same spirit of innovation found in Steppenwolf informs Malkovich’s production company, Mr. Mudd, which is the creative force behind some of the most intriguing films of the past ten years including Ghost World and Juno.

Malkovich remains of the one the busiest actors in Hollywood with a diverse line-up of projects, which will soon make their way to theaters. First up is the Coen brothers’ comedy, Burn After Reading, where Malkovich is part of a stellar ensemble featuring Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton. The film, which makes its premiere at the 2008 Venice Festival, tells the story of what happens when the private memoir of a CIA agent ends up in the hands of an unscrupulous duo that attempt to sell it. The film premieres in the U.S. on September 12, 2008.

Malkovich also stars in Gilles Bourdos’ Afterwards, which follows a mysterious doctor (Malkovich) who can sense when people are about to die. The film, a Mr. Mudd production, debuts October 2008. Malkovich also recently starred opposite Tom Hanks and his son Colin in Sean McGinly’s film The Great Buck Howard. The film follows an illusionist (Malkovich) in decline that mentors a young man (Colin Hanks) with a disapproving father (Tom Hanks). The film made its premiere at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Lastly, Malkovich will star in Disgrace, an independent that tells the story of a Cape Town professor who, after having an affair with a student, gets caught up in a mess of post-apartheid politics.

Most recently, Malkovich appeared in Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, opposite Angelina Jolie and in Stefen Fangmeier’s Eragon, opposite Jeremy Irons. He also starred in Raoul Ruiz’ Klimt. The film is a portrait of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt (Malkovich), whose lavish paintings came to symbolize the art-nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Having worked with many of world’s leading directors, Malkovich has made an indelible impression in such films as: Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game; Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich; Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady; Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire; Gary Sinise’s Of Mice and Men; Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky; Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons; Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun; Paul Newman’s The Glass Menagerie; Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields; and Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award® for Best Supporting Actor, for Places in the Heart (1985) and for In the Line of Fire (1994). Malkovich’s performance in Places in the Heart also earned him a Best Supporting Actor Award from the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. In 1999, he won New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor for Being John Malkovich.

In 1998, Malkovich joined producing partners Lianne Halfon and Russ Smith to create the production company, Mr. Mudd, whose first film was the celebrated film Ghost World, directed by Terry Zwigoff. In 2003, Malkovich followed this up with his own feature directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs, starring Academy Award® winner Javier Bardem. Other Mr. Mudd credits include The Libertine, starring Johnny Depp and Samantha Morton and Art School Confidential, also directed by Zwigoff and written by screenwriter/cartoonist Dan Clowes. Last year, Mr. Mudd landed its biggest box-office and critical success with Juno, starring Ellen Page, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman. The film, distributed through Fox Searchlight, received an Academy Award® for Best Original Screenplay (Diablo Cody) and three nominations for Best Motion Picture, Best Actress (Ellen Page) and Best Director (Jason Reitman).

Malkovich’s mark in television includes his Emmy Award-winning performance in the telefilm Death of a Salesman, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and co-starring Dustin Hoffman. Other notable credits include the miniseries’ Napoleon and the acclaimed HBO telefilm RKO 281, both garnering Malkovich Emmy Award nominations.

Between 1976 and 1982, Malkovich acted in, directed or designed sets for more than 50 Steppenwolf Theatre Company productions. Malkovich’s debut on the New York stage in the Steppenwolf production of Sam Shepard’s True West earned him an Obie Award. Other notable plays include Death of a Salesman; Slip of the Tongue; Sam Shepard’s State of Shock; and Lanford Wilson’s Burn This in New York, London and Los Angeles. He has directed numerous plays at Steppenwolf, including the celebrated Balm in Gilead in Chicago and off-Broadway; The Caretaker in Chicago and on Broadway; and Libra, which Malkovich adapted from Don DeLillo’s novel. His 2003 French stage production of Hysteria was honored with five Molière Award nominations including Best Director. In addition to film directorial debut on The Dancer Upstairs, Malkovich has directed three fashion shorts (Strap Hangings, Lady Behave, Hideous Man) for London designer Bella Freud. Malkovich recently received a Molière Award as Best Director for his production of Zach Helm’s Good Canary in Paris.

ANGELINA JOLIE continues to be one of Hollywood’s most talented leading actresses

Academy Award® and three-time Golden Globe winner ANGELINA JOLIE (Christine Collins) continues to be one of Hollywood’s most talented leading actresses. Jolie’s most recently released films were Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf and Michael Winterbottom’s critically acclaimed A Mighty Heart, the dramatic true story of Mariane and Daniel Pearl. Jolie’s performance in A Mighty Heart earned her nominations from the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild, Broadcast Film Critics and Film Independent’s Spirit Awards.

Jolie was heard as the voice of Tigress in DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda, opposite Jack Black, and was recently seen in the fantasy-thriller Wanted, for Timur Bekmambetov. Upcoming films include the long-awaited adaptation of Ayn Rand’s seminal novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

Jolie’s previous films include The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and co-starring Matt Damon; Mr. & Mrs. Smith, co-starring Brad Pitt; Alexander, directed by Oliver Stone and co-starring Colin Farrell and Anthony Hopkins; and the action/adventure Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, with Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. She lent her voice to the animated feature Shark Tale, directed by the creators of Shrek, which also featured the voices of Will Smith, Robert De Niro and Jack Black. Jolie also starred in the Warner Bros. thriller Taking Lives, also with Ethan Hawke. In 2003, she played the lead role in the action/adventure Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, the sequel to the 2001 box-office smash Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and portrayed a relief worker for the United Nations in the provocative drama Beyond Borders.

In 2001, she starred in director Simon West’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Original Sin, opposite Antonio Banderas for Gia writer/director Michael Cristofer. The previous year, she was seen along with co-stars Nicolas Cage and Robert Duvall as car thieves committing their final heist in the smash hit Gone in Sixty Seconds for producer Jerry Bruckheimer. She was also in the romantic comedy Life or Something Like It. Jolie’s portrayal of a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted garnered her an Academy Award®, her third Golden Globe Award, a Broadcast Film Critics Award, ShoWest’s Supporting Actress of the Year Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress. The film, based on the true story by Susanna Kaysen, was directed by James Mangold and co-starred Winona Ryder.

Prior to that, she played a rookie police officer opposite Denzel Washington’s veteran detective in the thriller The Bone Collector, directed by Phillip Noyce. She also co-starred in Mike Newell’s Pushing Tin with Billy Bob Thornton and John Cusack. Playing by Heart earned her the National Board of Review’s award for Breakthrough Performance; this character-driven drama, directed by Willard Carroll, featured an all-star ensemble cast, including Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Madeleine Stowe, Ellen Burstyn, Gillian Anderson and Dennis Quaid.

The HBO film Gia earned Jolie critical praise as well as a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of supermodel Gia Carangi, who died of AIDS. Jolie also received an Emmy nomination for her role opposite Gary Sinise in director John Frankenheimer’s George Wallace, a period epic for TNT about the controversial governor from Alabama. The film earned Jolie her first Golden Globe Award and a CableACE nomination for her portrayal of George Wallace’s second wife, Cornelia.

Jolie also co-starred with David Duchovny and Timothy Hutton in director Andy Wilson’s Playing God. Prior to that, she starred in Hallmark Hall of Fame’s four-hour miniseries presentation True Women; directed by Karen Arthur, it was based on Janice Woods Windle’s best-selling historical novel. Jolie also starred in Annette Haywood-Carter’s much-acclaimed Foxfire and Iain Softley’s Hackers.

A member of the famed MET Theatre Ensemble Workshop, Jolie trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and has also studied with Jan Tarrant in New York and Silvana Gallardo in Los Angeles.

Jolie has also received wide recognition for her humanitarian work. She was the first recipient of the Citizen of the World Award from the United Nations Correspondents Association, as well as the Global Humanitarian Award in 2005. In February 2007, Jolie was accepted by the bipartisan think tank Council on Foreign Relations for a special five-year term designed to nurture the next generation of foreign policy makers.

Jolie is also a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She helped push through the Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection Act and founded the National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children, an organization that provides free legal aid to asylum-seeking children.

L’Échange The production had a powerful effect on all the cast and crew

The production had a powerful effect on all the cast and crew, especially Jolie and her interest in celebrating what any parent would do to take care of his or her child. The actor concludes of a shared experience that bonded her with L’Échange’s cast and crew: “In films that call for really deep acting, you really cry together, you get angry together and you really pull through. Then you have this little journey, and it does bond you as human beings. You bond through your emotions and through your experiences, so I think it does make for fast friendships.”

Eastwood closes with a quote paraphrased from Jimmy Cagney, but it might as well have been said by Christine Collins herself. When pressed by detractors, one thing we can all do is “Plant your feet and tell the truth.”

If Walter Collins is alive today, he is 89 years old.

Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment Present—In Association With Relativity Media—A Malpaso Production of A Clint Eastwood Film: Angelina Jolie in L’Échange, starring John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Michael Kelly, Colm Feore, Jason Butler Harner, Amy Ryan, Geoff Pierson, Denis O’Hare, Frank Wood. The music for the film is by Clint Eastwood. The visual effects supervisor is Michael Owens; the casting is by Ellen Chenoweth. L’Échange’s costumes are designed by Deborah Hopper; the film is edited by Joel Cox, ACE, and Gary D. Roach. The production designer is James J. Murakami, and the director of photography is Tom Stern, ASC, AFC. L’Échange’s executive producers are Tim Moore and Jim Whitaker. The producers are Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Robert Lorenz. The drama is written by J. Michael Straczynski and directed and produced by Clint Eastwood.

L’Échange Clothing

After working on back-to-back period Eastwood films set in the 1940s (Flags of Our Father and Letters from Iwo Jima), Deborah Hopper knew of every major vintage clothing house from Los Angeles to Canada. She would employ all her contacts to find a range of clothing, undergarments and shoes for the close to 1,000 men, women and children that peopled the production. Additional research was necessary, however, to accurately depict the quantity of Depression-era clothing needed for the background actors.

From sharp wool suits for the police officers to knickers and long socks for the two Walters, “It’s always a challenge to try to find vintage clothes,” provides Hopper. “Especially with the earlier periods, because these fabrics simply don’t last; they fall apart. So we went everywhere around this country and then some.” She laughs, “We did come up with enough clothes, but barely.”

From working-class women to society matrons of the day, the late 1920s style included a demure silhouette of dropped-waist dresses, substantial fur-trimmed coats and cloche hats (to set off close bobs and finger-waved hair), pulled down low and worn with hand-knitted gloves. The decorum of the period was more formal; even the most casual looks appear quite conservative by today’s standards.

Luckily, once Hopper began to research archival footage on Christine Collins, she was able to compile enough information to pull together an accurate and complementary design palette for Angelina Jolie. The costume designer’s attention to detail and collaborative design aesthetic proved to be an integral part of Jolie’s approach to the character. “The wardrobe choices are really the first steps toward Christine,” Jolie comments. “There is something about the style of clothes of the ’20s that is very sweet. They make you feel a little softer and just so delicate, hidden behind it all. It helped me very much.”

One unexpected wardrobe item needed for several of Jolie’s scenes as a supervisor at the telephone company in which Collins oversees a staff of operators was a pair of leather-strapped roller skates…over heels. Jolie would have to learn—thanks in part to photos from the period that documented the practice—to stride up and down the film set in this unique transportation device.

“Roller skating in heels for a role is one of the funniest things I’ve done in my career,” laughs the actor. “It’s great that it’s in the story, though, because it’s an example of the nutty things that people did in the ’20s.”

L’Échange Locations

In L’Échange, the bustling City of Los Angeles serves as the backdrop of the Collins story as it plays out from Walter’s disappearance to Christine’s fight against the system. From the initial images of a happy family in a modest suburban home and the bustling phone operators’ bank where Christine whizzes the workday away on roller skates to staging hundreds of demonstrators marching on City Hall after they’re made aware of Christine’s treatment, L’Échange would crisscross Southern California.

An extensive amount of research was necessary to duplicate specific locations and images of the late 1920s and early ’30s. Initial location scouts revealed that older buildings had been torn down, streets replaced by super highways and complete neighborhoods razed—including the one where the Collins family lived (east of Chinatown in contemporary L.A.). That area is now unrecognizable if one compares photos from today with those taken 80 years ago.

The filmmakers looked to production designer James Murakami and location manager PATRICK MIGNANO to visualize the period in modern day Los Angeles. Murakami previously worked with Eastwood and DP Stern on Letters from Iwo Jima, so he was familiar with the director’s aesthetic and the cinematographer’s style.

It was a challenging task, but Murakami and his team were able to discover untapped suburban locales in San Dimas, San Bernadino and Pasadena, among other sites to stand in for ’20s-era L.A. The art department—complementing the location shoots in the above locales, Los Angeles City Hall and sets that were built on the Universal Studios backlot—supplemented key scenes. Naturally, visual effects supervisor Michael Owens would be called in to add effects enhancements and re-create backdrops such as the city skyline and the red streetcars that then populated the region.

Perhaps the biggest twist of kismet came with the discovery of a neighborhood in the Olde Town district of suburban San Dimas, located approximately 35 miles east of Los Angeles. A tree-lined block of homes provided a remarkably close facsimile of what Murakami needed for the interior and exterior of the 1920s Collins home, as well as the surrounding neighborhood.

“We were very fortunate to find the location in San Dimas,” remembers Murakami. “Very little had changed in that section of town, and after seeing some of the footage we shot…it was just beautiful. Overall, we kept it as simple as possible. The colors are subdued to make it comfortable. Our set decorating department fully fleshed out every set and location with a great attention to detail.”

In Los Angeles, the streetcar service, with the iconic red streetcars that crisscrossed from the City of Pasadena to the beaches of Santa Monica, was an aspect of the region’s rich history vital for inclusion in the story. Helpfully, the film’s red streetcar was equipped with an engine, so it could be driven on the streets of Pasadena and Los Angeles during the shoot.

Recalls Eastwood of Los Angeles’ changing landscape over the years, “I have the advantage because I’m senior to Rob and the others,” he laughs. “So, I remember a lot of those things growing up. When I first came to L.A. in the ’50s, it was quite a bit different. Even then, the red streetcars were everywhere. They were very popular at the time.”

Filming just outside the city limits of Lancaster, situated 75 miles north of Los Angeles, the production used a small farm to substitute for Northcott’s haunting chicken ranch. To inform their design, Murakami and team traveled to the original farm where the killings took place. “It was eerie to be there,” recalls the production designer, but it was necessary for the crew to understand the topography and layout. Using news photos from the period, they re-created the entire farm.

Current construction on Los Angeles City Hall was completed in 1928, but small details had to be considered when returning to the site for filming. The building on Spring Street today, surrounded by new architecture and parking lots, has shown its weathering over the decades. Once again, Owens’ effects team would step in to paint the world of 80 years ago.

Curiously, the past and present meshed as cast and crew filmed on the steps of City Hall. Actors Colm Feore and REED BIRNEY (as Chief Davis and Mayor Cryer) were filming a scene just feet away from the building’s dedication inscription—which identifies the honorable George E. Cryer as the city’s mayor. It was a surreal moment for actors cognizant of the historical figures they were portraying.

Re-creating 1920s L.A.: Locations and Design

With more than 30 films to his directorial credit, Eastwood has mastered the economy of shooting and considers himself a director influenced by choices he would make as an actor. He limits rehearsals to achieve a more authentic feel in the performances and is not a fan of endless takes, a fact about which the cast of L’Échange was appreciative. “Everything I do as a director is based upon what I prefer as an actor,” Eastwood says. “It’s all a learning process over the years. No matter how you plan it, things happen that either work for you or against you. So there’s always the excitement of trying to make it work, of taking a little stack of paper and make it into a living thing.”

It’s a factor his team embraced during production. “Clint’s extraordinary,” cites Jolie, “I can’t say enough about him. I could go on forever. As a director, he’s so decisive. He’s got that leadership quality of a great man who values every single person on the film, and so they bring their best, and it’s appreciated. He takes the time to consider things. He’s just brilliant. I don’t think I want to do any other films without him.”

Cops, Preachers and Serial Killers: Casting the Film

As Christine Collins navigated her way through landmines of wavering public opinion, disbelieving police and shadowy gun squads to find her son, she was joined by a group of supporters and detractors. From activist Reverend Gustav Briegleb, the pastor of St. Paul’s and Westlake Presbyterian churches in Los Angeles, and attorney S.S. Hahn, a defense attorney known for high profile criminal cases, to Police Captain J.J. Jones, the stalwart adversary who would continue to be a presence throughout Collins’ seven-year quest for answers, the screenwriter kept the actual names of players in Collins’ world whenever possible. L’Échange would also allow for characters that were an amalgam of people and types who lived in L.A. of the day.
Reverend Briegleb was considered a fearless activist who positioned himself as a watchdog against the unbridled corruption in city government, and even the film industry. Briegleb was quick to point out that fellow Los Angelenos were too easily buying the stories of police who claimed their dodgy actions were beneficial; he preached that citizens should look closer at the truth and ferret out the corruption. Portrayed by accomplished actor John Malkovich, the reverend’s insider knowledge of the city’s political machine played a pivotal role in Collins’ search and, ultimately (in our story), saved her life.

Of the impact Reverend Briegleb had on Christine Collins, Jolie explains that the two had a “wonderful friendship.” She offers, “He’s quite a voice at the time, and he really draws her to him and helps guide and teach her. He gives Christine this sense of strength, which can only come from somebody of a different kind of authority. The reverend says, ‘You are not crazy, and these are not good people; even if they’re in authority, that doesn’t mean you should give them that respect. You should question them.’ He helps her to find her own voice.”

Eastwood previously worked with Malkovich on the drama In the Line of Fire and was keen to again partner with the film and stage performer. “I’ve liked John’s acting for a long time,” says the director. “I thought that he would be an interesting casting choice for the role. John brings a little edge, a little quirkiness to the table; he’s a chameleon.”

Malkovich was curious to tackle the part of this early crusader for justice. Of Briegleb’s activism, he offers, “It’s probably a fairly early example of the kind of pressure that can be brought to bear by the media. Briegleb had his radio show; he did his radio address and read his sermons. He really put a spotlight on the LAPD and on what he perceived to be their horrendous practices.”

Reverend Briegleb saw the 1920s LAPD as the most incompetent, violent and corrupt police force “this side of the Rocky Mountains.” Malkovich viewed his character as a man who rallied for justice, even when it was unpopular and dangerous. The performer admits he found it, “amazing to think…as my character quotes of Police Chief Davis: ‘We will hold trial on gunmen in the streets of Los Angeles. I want them brought in dead, not alive, and I will reprimand any officer who shows the least bit of mercy to a criminal.’” That kind of pressure on Davis’ officers could explain their interest in quickly solving the Walter Collins case…and ignoring the fact that the wrong boy had been returned to the right mother.

Legendary attorney S.S. Hahn, played by character actor GEOFF PIERSON, took on the Collins case and sewed the seeds for future legislation that would eventually overturn “Code 12” incarcerations. As the scion of the prominent Los Angeles family, his political legacy spanned decades…and includes future generations of politicians from former L.A. County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn to its recent mayor, James Hahn.

Actor Jeffrey Donovan was cast as the merciless, by-the-book police Captain J.J. Jones, the head of LAPD’s juvenile division who bullies the traumatized Collins into accepting the young boy as hers. Although Collins filed a civil suit against the city and Jones and won $10,800, she never recovered any of the monetary judgment against him. That would not keep the crusader from coming back every couple of years to try and reclaim the damages to fund the search for her still-missing boy.
Donovan was fascinated by the fact that not only was his character based on an actual person, but also by the amount of power Captain Jones wielded. The actor notes, “It’s unfathomable what he did to this woman. I talked to Angelina about the scenes when I’m committing her to the insane asylum; what I’m saying is actually in public record. I couldn’t believe that another human being—without warrant and without regard of any facts—could actually commit someone with such a quick snap of his fingers.”

Even as the Walter Collins case remained unsolved, a stunning revelation from a parallel investigation would come to light for local law enforcement. The twisted story of a charismatic child predator named Gordon Stewart Northcott would set the stage for years of a psychological cat-and-mouse game between Northcott and Christine Collins.

In 1928, Gordon Northcott’s (Jason Butler Harner) 15-year-old nephew, Sanford Clark (EDDIE ALDERSON), led police to a grisly discovery at his uncle’s chicken ranch near Wineville, California (located near Riverside and today known as Mira Loma). There the officers, led by Detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly), uncovered the remains of children killed with an axe and buried nearby. Sanford swore that young Walter was one of those killed, but the truth is still unclear today.

The subsequent investigation uncovered the grisly life of the Northcott “murder farm” and partially solved the mysterious disappearances of some of the dozens of young boys who had vanished in the region. It was found that 24-year-old Northcott, along with his mother, Sarah Louise Northcott, had kidnapped, tortured and killed young boys on their land. The serial killer was ultimately convicted and executed for the slaying of four boys, though the number is estimated to be much higher. A narcissistic publicity hound, Gordon Northcott—until the day he was executed by the state of California—used contradicting statements to toy with Christine Collins about the fate of Walter. Northcott’s conspiratorial mother was given a life sentence at San Quentin Prison.

When casting Northcott, Eastwood was shocked by a similarity in look between the infamous murderer and performer Jason Butler Harner. The director comments: “Ironically, he has a certain resemblance to our serial killer. He has a certain look, and when he was fixed up, he looked very much like Northcott. Jason’s a terrific actor.”

Though difficult for any performer to thoroughly embody a sociopath, Harner was moved by the twisted game Northcott played with Christine Collins. Notes the actor, “From the moment Gordon meets her in the courtroom, the first time he sees her, he plays cat and mouse with her. The minute he sees and recognizes her, he assumes a familiarity, because she’s in the headlines…as he is in the headlines. Therefore, in his eyes, they’re kindred spirits.”

The filmmakers sought to build the supporting roles through a mix of stage and character actors from New York and Los Angeles. Stage and screen performer DENIS O’HARE, who recently co-starred opposite Jolie in A Mighty Heart, was cast as Dr. Jonathan Steel, a psychiatrist who brutally rules the County mental ward in which Christine is forcibly placed under a “Code 12.” O’Hare explains that term “was a catchall excuse to punish anyone who dissented, protested, caused trouble or objected to police methods. I think the net was pretty wide, and it tended to punish women.”

One of Steel’s unwilling patients was Carol Dexter, a prostitute who had a relationship with a police officer that went awry. Dexter, now forced to endure subhuman treatment at the hands of the mental ward’s staff, becomes an unlikely savoir to Collins after the grieving mother’s incarceration. The detainee enlightens the terrified Collins on the realities of their incarceration, and attempts to spare Christine the indignities to which she’s been subjected. To play the “soiled dove,” (a term of the era for ladies of the night), Academy Award®-nominated actress Amy Ryan was cast.

Fresh off her lauded performance in Gone Baby Gone, the actor was eager to visit another era of American history and play a wrongfully accused character. Notes Ryan: “Carol says to Christine, ‘If we’re crazy, meaning women, nobody has to listen to us.’ If a woman had an opinion or went against any voice of authority, she must have been crazy. Therefore, the attitude was ‘lock them up!’”

Angelina Jolie comments that when she last played a character in a mental institution (and won an Oscar® for her performance as escape artist Lisa Rowe in 1999’s Girl, Interrupted), her role was similar to her savior in L’Échange. Jolie reflects, “Last time I was in a mental institution for a film, I was certainly more Amy’s character. I was the more aggressive, kind of fun one.”

To further drive the story, the filmmakers fleshed out the real-life individuals of Christine Collins’ era by creating several merged characters. Remarks producer Lorenz, “Joe did an excellent job of putting all the facts in order and then crafting these composite characters that we fit into the story so they could move it along. It’s amazing that it comes together so neatly as a story and, yet, it is still rooted in truth.” These characters include Lester Ybarra, the LAPD detective who would break the Northcott case and establish a possible link with the Walter Collins case after local law enforcement are tipped off by Northcott’s nephew, Sanford Clark. Additionally, the life and back-story of Police Chief James E. Davis (portrayed by Colm Feore), a man who was quite eager to have Christine Collins disappear, was reimagined by the screenwriter/historian.

Last but not least, young performer GATTLIN GRIFFITH was cast to play the nine-year-old Walter Collins and actor DEVON CONTI appears as his doppelganger, Arthur Hutchens, the manipulative 12-year-old who simply wants to escape life in the Midwest.

Cast in place, the director and producers would go about the arduous task of imagining the world of Los Angeles as it existed almost 80 years earlier.

Eastwood, Imagine and Jolie Team: L’Échange is Greenlit

The shocking “based on actual events” story caught the attention of Academy Award®-winning producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, who have excelled at bringing real-life stories to the big screen—notably with such critical and box-office successes as American Gangster, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Friday Night Lights and Apollo 13.

“There is an excitement for me when drawing from a true story,” remarks Grazer. “I liked the subject matter of L’Échange, found the culture surrounding this incident to be fascinating, and in some ways appalling, but it captivated me. The fact that it did happen gives this story so much more emotional gravity.”

Knowing director/producer Clint Eastwood had a similar sensibility when it came to fact-based material, Grazer and Howard called the filmmaker to discuss the script they had optioned. “I took it with me on a trip to Berlin,” recalls Eastwood. “On the way back on the plane, I read it and I liked it a lot. As soon as I got in, I called Brian and Ron and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do this.’ And they said, ‘Angelina Jolie liked the script and wants to do this.’ I said, ‘She’d be great. I like her work a lot.’ And that’s how it came about—very quick and simple.”

Eastwood’s longtime production partner, Rob Lorenz, was just as awestruck as others who had read Straczynski’s tale. “I was about 15 pages into the script, and I had to flip back to see if it was really a true story; it was just so amazing to me,” Lorenz remarks. “Joe [Straczynski] had done something very clever. He stuck photocopies of news clippings every 15 or 20 pages in the script, just to remind you it was true. I was not only amazed it was all true, but astonished that I had never heard of the story before and nobody seemed familiar with it.”

With their interest piqued for a script in which Eastwood found the “truth was stranger than fiction,” Eastwood and Lorenz agreed with the Imagine Entertainment team that the unbelievable events would make a captivating film, as long as Academy Award® winner Angelina Jolie took the role as the working-class single mother who made it her life’s mission to find her boy. Of his Christine Collins, Eastwood remarks, “Angelina is unique. She reminds me a lot of the actresses from the Golden Age of movies in the ’40s—Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Susan Hayward, all of them. They were all very distinctive, and they all had a lot of presence. She’s a tremendous actress.”

Howard and Grazer were pleased with the outcome on all fronts. Notes Grazer, “I bought L’Échange’s script and, like everybody does, created a list of the top directors in the world. You start with your dream and you work your way down. I started with a dream and got it with Clint Eastwood, and then to have Angelina Jolie step into this role was very exciting. She is just perfect for it. She’s so emotionally available, alert and present.”

Despite a riveting story and the high caliber filmmaking team, Jolie was initially reluctant to tackle the role of a mother whose son is kidnapped. Understandably so, as she had recently finished a heartbreaking portrayal of Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart, the true story of the kidnapping and execution of journalist Daniel Pearl. However, she was willing to explore options and read the screenplay. Straczynski’s interpretation of Christine’s tale changed her mind.

“It’s an extraordinary story,” Jolie reflects. “I couldn’t stop reading it. When she faced a setback and would get back up, I’d think, ‘Good, you’re back up.’ Christine Collins is a woman whom I came to admire but, as an actor, there was a lot about the story I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to do a film about a child being kidnapped, because I think there’s something to bringing certain things into your environment, in your thoughts and in your world. But ultimately, it was her strength when faced with such odds that swayed me. I’m most fond of this story because of how it exposes corruption of those in power. It’s very timely; we still deal with that today.”

With the director, producers and lead actor in place, Eastwood and the other filmmakers began their search for the other players in Christine Collins’ late 1920s and early ’30s world—the men and women who would shape the story of L’Échange.

Legacy of a Mother’s Love: Christine Collins is Remembered

The history of Los Angeles is marked by sensational tales of corruption, cover-ups and murder during the city’s formative years. From the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle rape and murder trial of young starlet Virginia Rappe in 1921 and the kidnapping of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in 1926 to The Black Dahlia murder in 1947, scandal has long permeated the city and shone unfavorable light upon her political operatives.

But it was the little-remembered story of one working-class woman’s struggle—amidst insurmountable odds—to find her missing son that would, almost 80 years later, forge a partnership between several of Hollywood’s most highly regarded filmmakers. The incredible tale of Christine Collins was one that almost vanished to obscurity before a former journalist stumbled upon her sensational, poignant story.

Within the subterranean halls of Los Angeles City Hall, the dusty archives of city business dating back almost 100 years are housed. Among these tens of thousands of pages of documents lies the public record of Christine Collins and the City Council welfare hearings from the late 1920s. They tell a patchwork tale of the disappearance of her nine-year-old young son, Walter, and the corrupt machinations of the Los Angeles Police Department during and after the flawed investigation of the case.

Several years ago, screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, a former journalist who has written for Los Angeles Times, The Herald Examiner and Time, among other publications, stumbled across this astonishing story of a working-class woman who brought down a political machine. As the adage is written, a reporter is only as good as his sources, and Straczynski knew he had a lead when a longtime contact phoned him up.

Recalls the screenwriter: “A source I had at City Hall called one day and said they were burning old records and that there was something I should take a look at before they put it into the incinerator. So I zoomed down to City Hall, and they had a transcript of a City Council welfare hearing in the case of Christine Collins. I began reading the testimony and thought, ‘This can’t actually have happened. This has got to be a mistake.’ But it was enough for me to get hooked before the book went into the fire.”

Los Angels in 1928 was in the grips of a despotic political infrastructure, led by Mayor George E. Cryer and enforced by Police Chief James E. “Two Guns” Davis (often photographed in a gunslinger pose with his weapons) and his sanctioned gun squad that terrorized the city at will. That despotic rule began to unravel when Collins, a single mother raising a son in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles, reported her nine-year-old missing. Months of fruitless searching followed, and the police had nothing to show, save an onslaught of negative publicity and mounting public pressure to find a solid lead in the kidnapping.

When a boy claiming to be Walter was discovered in DeKalb, Illinois, Christine Collins—and all involved in the search—waited with bated breath. Letters and photos were exchanged, and the authorities believed the missing persons case had been solved. Collins scraped together the money to bring the boy home, and LAPD organized a very public photo-op reunion with the found child and anxious mother.

Hoping to put a stop to the scrutiny surrounding their inability to solve this case and others—and desperate for uplift from human-interest success to counter the string of corruption scandals—members of the department felt the reunion could spell public redemption for LAPD’s top brass.

The only problem was that the child who arrived home was not Walter.

Despite her immediate and repeated declarations that the boy returned was not hers, Collins was rebuffed by the officer in charge of her case, Captain J.J. Jones. She was told—as recounted from the City Council hearing transcripts of the day—to “try him out for a couple of weeks.” Confused and disoriented, she agreed.
Case closed.

Until three weeks later, when Collins brought “Walter” back, insisting that, no matter what anyone said, this child wasn’t hers. Unaccustomed to having their actions questioned by anyone, let alone a woman, Captain Jones—with the tacit approval of Chief Davis—subjected Collins to slander and committed her to the County psychopathic ward as a patient, instead of admitting the mistake of returning the wrong boy. Collins would be forced to spend five harrowing days in the psychiatric ward, housed against her will due to a “Code 12”—a term that referred to a difficult or inconvenient person, usually a woman, jailed or committed to the local psychopathic ward without a warrant or any legal due process.

The child who reappeared as Walter later admitted to being 12-year-old Arthur Hutchens (who also used the alias Billy Fields), a Midwest runaway who wanted to come to Hollywood in hopes of meeting his favorite film actor, Tom Mix. At a roadside café in Illinois, a diner remarked that he had an astonishing resemblance to the kidnapped Collins boy of Los Angeles. Hutchens hatched a plot to turn himself in to local authorities as the missing Walter, have Christine Collins pay for his bus fare to Los Angeles and provide room and board. His actions unknowingly set off a chain of events that would forever alter the policing of Los Angeles’ residents.

For Straczynski what was, at first glance, astonishing became increasingly compelling the more he dug into the details of the case. He researched the story for approximately a year, digging through the intricate details of Collins’ seven-year journey to find answers surrounding her son’s disappearance. What he found was even more disturbing than Hutchens’ hoax. Underneath the dusty files emerged a parallel case—one that told the depraved details of child predator Gordon Northcott (alternately admitting and then denying the killing of the still missing Walter Collins) and the unyielding power and violence of the Los Angeles authorities of the period.

The screenwriter also discovered a man named Gustav A. Briegleb, a Presbyterian minister who assisted Collins in her search for answers. A longtime thorn in the side of the establishment, the community activist was a voice of authority whose radio show and powerful sermons challenged listeners not to turn a blind-eye to police corruption. Briegleb worked with Collins and her attorney to ensure that Walter’s story was not buried and Collins’ inhuman treatment in the mental ward was revealed to all who would listen. Their work led to the dismissal of senior civic leaders and exposed corruption that was commonplace in the day.

Although Collins died in 1935 not knowing what happened to her son, Straczynski sums up just how powerful her legacy was: “The core of it all is Christine Collins’ desire to find out what happened, and never giving up, no matter what anyone threw at her. She never abandoned the quest to find out what happened to her son. That tenacity carried her through things that would break anybody else, but she never once stopped fighting. That reverberated throughout the state’s legal system, and I wanted to pay tribute.”

Straczynski admits of drafting his script: “My intention was very simple: to honor what Christine Collins did. My job was to tell the story as honestly as I could and honor the fight she waged and how she never once lost faith and kept looking for her son. Her simple question: ‘Where is my son?’ brought down the entire L.A. city structure.” To add to the veracity of his story, the writer would pull quotes verbatim from the files…along with other direct testimony he incorporated into the film’s script.

Screenplay finished, Straczynski would begin the search for filmmakers and a Christine Collins who could honor the story of not only this pioneer in victim’s rights, but a champion of the people. He would find that in Clint Eastwood, Imagine Entertainment and Angelina Jolie. It was a proud moment for Straczynski, whose previous script work had been predominantly in the genre of television science fiction. L’Échange would be his first produced feature film.

L’Échange tells the story of one woman whose invincible spirit

Production Information

Mrs. Collins told her story clearly, stating that from the first she was convinced the boy was not her missing son…

She was subjected to an exhaustive examination by President Schweitzer, who wound up asking her what happened shortly before she was taken to the County Hospital.

“I was requested to appear before Captain Jones,” she said.

“In the presence of several others, he said: ‘What are you trying to do, make a lot of fools out of us all? Are you trying to shirk your duty as a mother and
have the State provide for your son? You are just a fool.’”

—Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1928,
reporting on Mrs. Christine Collins at Police Commission Hearings


CLINT EASTWOOD (Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven, Letters from Iwo Jima) directs ANGELINA JOLIE (The Good Shepherd, A Mighty Heart, Girl, Interrupted) and JOHN MALKOVICH (Dangerous Liaisons, Beowulf, upcoming Burn After Reading) in an emotional and provocative drama based on actual events that forever transformed the City of Los Angeles. L’Échange tells the story of one woman whose invincible spirit and refusal to surrender brought down a corrupt police department and ushered in a new era of dignity and equality under the law.

Los Angeles, March 1928: On a beautiful Saturday morning in a working-class suburb, single mother Christine Collins (Oscar® winner Angelina Jolie) says goodbye to her nine-year-old son, Walter, and leaves for her job as a telephone operator. But when Christine returns to their modest home, she is confronted with every parent’s worst nightmare: her son has vanished.

An exhaustive and fruitless search ensues, but Walter has disappeared without a trace…until five months later, when a child—claiming to be her boy—is returned by police who are eager to bask in the public relations coup of reuniting mother and child. Dazed by the swirl of cops, reporters, photographers and her own conflicted emotions, Christine is persuaded to take the boy home. But in her heart, she knows he is not Walter.

As she pushes authorities to keep looking for her real son, Christine learns that in Prohibition-era L.A., women don’t challenge the system and live to tell their story. Slandered as delusional and unfit, she finds an ally in community activist Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), who helps her fight the city to look for her missing boy.

Facing corrupt police who question her sanity and a skeptical public hungry for a fairy-tale ending, Christine desperately hunts for answers. As she searches, she becomes an unlikely heroine for the poor and downtrodden who have been systematically abused and swept aside by the police state that has gripped L.A. Now, one woman’s quest won’t stop until she finds her son…unless those assigned to protect and serve silence her for good.

Joining director/producer Eastwood for the drama as producers are Imagine Entertainment’s Academy Award® winner BRIAN GRAZER (American Gangster, Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind), Oscar® winner RON HOWARD (Frost/Nixon, Cinderella Man), as well as Oscar® nominee ROBERT LORENZ (Letters from Iwo Jima, Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River).

Joining Jolie and Malkovich is an accomplished cast that includes JEFFREY DONOVAN (television’s Burn Notice) as Captain J.J. Jones, the head of LAPD’s juvenile investigation unit assigned to find Walter; MICHAEL KELLY (Broken English) as Detective Lester Ybarra, the officer who initially links Walter’s disappearance to another crime spree; COLM FEORE (Chicago) as LAPD Police Chief James E. Davis, the head of the corrupt department; JASON BUTLER HARNER (television’s John Adams) as Gordon Northcott, a serial killer who may have the clues to Walter’s disappearance; and AMY RYAN (Gone Baby Gone) as Carol Dexter, a fellow innocent prisoner who aids Christine during her lockdown in a mental ward.

Leading the behind-the-scenes talent is a seasoned crew of Eastwood film veterans, including director of photography TOM STERN (Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers), production designer JAMES J. MURAKAMI (Letters from Iwo Jima, Rails & Ties), Oscar®-winning editor JOEL COX (Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby) and editor GARY D. ROACH (Letters from Iwo Jima, Rails & Ties), costume designer DEBORAH HOPPER (Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River) and visual effects supervisor MICHAEL OWENS (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima). The drama’s screenplay is by J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI (upcoming They Marched Into Sunlight).

L’Échange’s executive producers are TIM MOORE (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima) and JIM WHITAKER (American Gangster, Cinderella Man).

Taken Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace, Goran Kostic, Katie Cassidy

Starring: Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace, Goran Kostic, Katie Cassidy

Directed by: Pierre Morel

Screenplay by: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen

Release Date: September 19th, 2008

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for for intense sequences of violence, disturbing thematic material, sexual content, some drug references and language.

Studio: 20th Century Fox

What could be worse for a father than to sit helplessly on the end of a cellphone connection as his daughter is abducted? That's the nightmare that becomes reality for Bryan, a former secret agent, who has a only few hours to grab Kim back from a fearsome gang that specializes in selling young women. The first problem Bryan has to solve is that he's in Los Angeles and Kim was taken in Paris...

Death Race Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson, Joan Allen, Ian McShane

Starring: Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson, Joan Allen, Ian McShane, Natalie Martinez, Jason Clarke

Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson

Screenplay by: J.F. Lawton, Paul W.S. Anderson

Release Date: September 26th, 2008

MPAA Rating: R for for strong violence and language.

Studio: Universal Pictures

A penitentiary full of felons has inspired the jailers to create a grisly pastime ripe for lucrative kickbacks. Now, adrenalized inmates, a global audience hungry for televised violence and a spectacular arena come together to form the Death Race.

Three-time speedway champion Jensen Ames is an expert at survival in the harsh landscape that has become our country. Just as he thinks he has turned his life around, the ex-con is framed for a gruesome murder he didn't commit. Forced to don the mask of the mythical driver Frankenstein-a crowd favorite who seems impossible to kill-Ames is given an easy choice by Terminal Island's warden: suit up or rot away in a cell.

His face hidden by a metallic mask, one convict will be put through an insane three-day challenge. Ames must survive a gauntlet of the most vicious criminals in the country's toughest prison to claim the prize of freedom. Driving a monster car outfitted with machine guns, flamethrowers and grenade launchers, one desperate man will destroy anything in his path to win the most twisted spectator sport on Earth.

James Bond: Quantum of Solace Daniel Craig, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Giancarlo Giannini

Starring: Daniel Craig, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Giancarlo Giannini, Anatole Taubmann

Directed by: Marc Forster

Screenplay by: Robert Wade, Neal Purvis

Release Date: November 7th, 2008

MPAA Rating: None.

Studio: Columbia Pictures (Sony)

The 22nd James Bond adventure will be released by Columbia Pictures on November 7, 2008 with Daniel Craig reprising the role of the legendary British secret agent.

"Quantum of Solace" continues the high octane adventures of James Bond (Daniel Craig) in "Casino Royale."

Betrayed by Vesper, the woman he loved, 007 fights the urge to make his latest mission personal. Pursuing his determination to uncover the truth, Bond and M (Judi Dench) interrogate Mr White (Jesper Christensen) who reveals the organisation which blackmailed Vesper is far more complex and dangerous than anyone had imagined.

Forensic intelligence links an Mi6 traitor to a bank account in Haiti where a case of mistaken identity introduces Bond to the beautiful but feisty Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a woman who has her own vendetta. Camille leads Bond straight to Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a ruthless business man and major force within the mysterious organisation.

On a mission that leads him to Austria, Italy and South America, Bond discovers that Greene, conspiring to take total control of one of the world's most important natural resources, is forging a deal with the exiled General Medrano (Joaquin Cosio). Using his associates in the organisation, and manipulating his powerful contacts within the CIA and the British government, Greene promises to overthrow the existing regime in a Latin American country, giving the General control of the country in exchange for a seemingly barren piece of land.

In a minefield of treachery, murder and deceit, Bond allies with old friends in a battle to uncover the truth. As he gets closer to finding the man responsible for the betrayal of Vesper, 007 must keep one step ahead of the CIA, the terrorists and even M, to unravel Greene's sinister plan and stop his organisation.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter, David Bradley, Jim Broadbent, Jessie Cave, Robbie Coltrane, Warwick Davis, Frank Dillane, Tom Felton, Michael Gambon

Directed by: David Yates

Screenplay by: Steven Kloves

Release Date: November 21th, 2008

MPAA Rating: None.

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

Tagline: I'm not safe with you, Harry

Voldemort is tightening his grip on both the Muggle and wizarding worlds and Hogwarts is no longer the safe haven it once was. Harry suspects that dangers may even lie within the castle, but Dumbledore is more intent upon preparing him for the final battle that he knows is fast approaching.

Together they work to find the key to unlock Voldemort's defenses and, to this end, Dumbledore recruits his old friend and colleague, the well-connected and unsuspecting bon vivant Professor Horace Slughorn, whom he believes holds crucial information. Meanwhile, the students are under attack from a very different adversary as teenage hormones rage across the ramparts. Harry finds himself more and more drawn to Ginny, but so is Dean Thomas.

And Lavender Brown has decided that Ron is the one for her, only she hadn't counted on Romilda Vane's chocolates! And then there's Hermione, simpering with jealously but determined not to show her feelings. As romance blossoms, one student remains aloof. He is determined to make his mark, albeit a dark one. Love is in the air, but tragedy lies ahead and Hogwarts may never be the same again.

And yet...

As in all wars, life goes on. Sixth-year students learn to Apparate - and lose a few eyebrows in the process. The Weasley twins expand their business. Teenagers flirt and fight and fall in love. Classes are never straightforward, though Harry receives some extraordinary help from the mysterious Half-Blood Prince.

So it's the home front that takes center stage in the multilayered sixth installment of the story of Harry Potter. Here at Hogwarts, Harry will search for the full and complex story of the boy who became Lord Voldemort - and thereby find what may be his only vulnerability.

Laura Harring has been one of Hollywood’s hottest rising stars

Laura Harring (Sara Noriega)

Ever since astounding audiences and critics alike with her breakthrough performance in David Lynch’s award winning Mulholland Drive, for which she received an Alma Award for Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture, Laura Harring has been one of Hollywood’s hottest rising stars and here is what she has coming up in 2007; this June, catch Laura in the upcoming Warner Brothers feature Nancy Drew: The Mystery in Hollywood Hills starring alongside Emma Roberts for director Andrew Fleming and producer Jerry Weintraub.

A versatile actress who has played a great diversity of roles in her career, Harring’s film credits also include John Q with Denzel Washington, The King with Gael Garcia Bernal and William Hurt, The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory, with the legendary Raul Julia, and the HBO movie “Walkout,” directed by Edward James Olmos.

She has had a recurring role on FX’s critically acclaimed hit series, “The Shield,” as Becca Doyle, a defense attorney who willingly commits to pro bono cases for people she feels are redeemable, she also has guest starred on “Law & Order: SVU,” and had a featured cameo in the David Lynch film, “Inland Empire.”

The international Herald Tribune has compared her to Ava Gardner and film critic Roger Ebert likened her to Rita Hayworth.

Harring lived the first ten years of her life in Mexico, before her family relocated to San Antonio, Texas. She was the first Latina to win the Miss USA crown.

Truly an acting chameleon, Laura just completed filming opposite Frank Langella as "The sophisticated lady, a classical jazz singer in the motion picture, On the Hook.

Harring currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

The artistic career of Fernanda Montenegro has encompassed theater, television and feature film

Fernanda Montenegro (Tránsito Ariza)

The artistic career of Fernanda Montenegro has encompassed theater, television and feature film. Her very first stage performance took place in 1950 in the play “Alegres Canções nas Montanhas,” with Fernando Torres. Her relationship with Torres resulted in a marriage which lasts to this day. The couple have two children, the actress Fernanda Torres and the theatrical designer, visual programmer and film director Cláudio Torres. It was in the 1950’s that Montenegro had her first contact with television, working in detective dramas.

Montenegro began working in feature films in 1964, when she acted in director Leon Hirszman’s adaptation of “A Falecida.” One of the most important was in They Don’t Wear Black-Tie (1980), also directed by Hirszman. Fernanda acted opposite Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and the film won the Golden Lion Award as best movie in the Venice Film Festival. For her participation in the movie Tudo Bem, directed by Arnaldo Jabor, she won her first international award as best actress at Italy’s Taormina Film Festival in 1980.

Montenegro received international acclaim for her performance in 1988’s Central Station, directed by Walter Salles, for which she was nominated as Best Actress for both an Oscar and Golden Globe, and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. For the film O Outro Lado Da Rua, directed by Marcos Bernistein, she won the Best Actress award at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Montenegro’s recent film credits include Traição (directed by Cláudio Torres, José Henrique Fonseca and Arthur Fontes), Redentor (directed by Cláudio Torres), Olga, (by Jayme Monjardim) and House of Sand (directed by Andrucha Waddington).

Schreiber made his directorial debut with Everything is Illuminated, for Warner Independent Pictures

Liev Schreiber (Lotario Thurgot)

Widely considered one of the finest actors of his generation, in 2005, Liev Schreiber won the Tony Award for his portrayal of Ricky Roma in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross".

He was last seen opposite Ed Norton and Naomi Watts in The Painted Veil for Warner Independent. Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil is a love story set in the 1920s that tells the story of a young English couple who get married for the wrong reasons and relocate to Shanghai, where she falls in love with someone else.

In January 2007, Schreiber returned to Broadway starring in Eric Bogosian's first Broadway staging of "Talk Radio" in which he received his 2nd TONY nomination. First brought to an off-Broadway stage in 1987, the play was later made into the controversial film directed by Oliver Stone.

In 2006, Schreiber returned to the stage in the Public Theater's new production of Macbeth opposite Jennifer Ehle and directed by Moises Kaufman. Shakespeare in the Park's Macbeth was staged at the The Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

In 2005, Schreiber made his directorial debut with Everything is Illuminated, for Warner Independent Pictures. Adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer's bestselling novel of the same name, Everything is Illuminated is a blend of high comedy and great tragedy, that tells the story of a young American Jewish man's quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather--in a small Ukrainian town that was wiped off the map by the Nazi invasion. Prior to publication of the novel, Schreiber read an excerpt in The New Yorker, secured the rights himself, wrote the screenplay and subsequently brought the project to WIP. The film, starring Elijah Wood, was recognized by the 2006 National Film Board as one of the top ten films of the year.

Schreiber's distinguished list of acting credits include: The Omen, Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate, The Sum of All Fears, Kate & Leopold, Michael Almerayda's Hamlet, The Hurricane opposite Denzel Washington, Tony Goldwyn's A Walk on the Moon, Robert Benton's Twilight with Paul Newman, Barry Levinson's sci-fi epic Sphere, the box office hits Scream, Scream II, Scream III, and Ransom.

Schreiber is also known for his work in such acclaimed independent features as Stanley Tucci's Big Night, Party Girl, The Daytrippers with Hope Davis, Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking, with Catherine Keener, Nora Ephron's Mixed Nuts, Antonia Bird's Mad Love, Hal Salwen's Denise Calls Up, and Tom Gilroy's Spring Forward with Ned Beatty, for which he also served as a producer.

Initially interested in playwriting, Schreiber went on to spend a year studying acting with the faculty from England's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1992, he graduated with an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. His impressive stage credits include his critically acclaimed turn as Henry V in last summer's Shakespeare in the Park production at the Delacorte Theatre, "The Mercy Seat," opposite Sigourney Weaver and directed by Neil Labute, Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," co-starring Juliette Binoche and "Moonlight" with Blythe Danner and Jason Robards. Schreiber's enduring relationship with the Public Theatre's New York Shakespeare Festival has produced several critically acclaimed performances including, the title role in "Hamlet," Iago in "Othello," Macbeth," "The Tempest" and "Cymbeline" for which he won an Obie award. Other productions include, "All for One," "In the Summer House," "Escape from Happiness," "The Real Thing," "Richard III," "Underground," and the Moscow Art Theatre's production of "Ivanov."

For television, Schreiber received rave reviews for his extended guest starring role on "CSI”, as well as for his portrayal of Orson Welles in "RKO 281" (Emmy and Golden Globe nominations); additional credits include "Lackawana Blues" , "Spinning Borris," "Buffalo Girls," "People V," and "The Sunshine Boys" with Woody Allen and Peter Falk. As a voiceover artist Schreiber has narrated numerous documentaries including the popular HBO Sports series as well as PBS series "The History of Rock and Roll."

Schreiber currently resides in New York.

Award-winning actor Hector Elizondo has a successful career spanning 40 years that includes film, television, theater and radio

Hector Elizondo (Don Leo)

Award-winning actor Hector Elizondo has a successful career spanning 40 years that includes film, television, theater and radio. In 1997, Elizondo won the prestigious Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for his portrayal of ‘Dr. Phillip Watters’ on CBS’ “Chicago Hope.” For six years on the show, Elizondo delivered a heartfelt and poignant performance that earned him four Emmy nominations, while creating a character that will be etched in television history for a long time to come.

Elizondo was also nominated for both a Golden Globe and American Comedy Award for his portrayal of a hotel manager in the mega feature hit Pretty Woman. He currently stars with Jimmy Smits in the new CBS series, “Cane”. Elizondo is one of those rare actors who continue to move back and forth freely between starring roles on Broadway, television and feature films.

Elizondo’s other film credits include: The Music Within, Young Doctors in Love, The Flamingo Kid, Nothing in Common, Runaway Bride, American Gigolo, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Tortilla Soup, and both Princess Diaries I & II.

A native New Yorker, Elizondo first gained recognition on the New York stage for his portrayal of ‘God’ in “Steambath,” which earned him an Obie Award. High praise followed for his Broadway roles in Neil Simon’s “Prisoner of Second Avenue,” “The Great White Hope,” “Sly Fox,” for which he received a Drama Desk Award nomination, and the critically-acclaimed Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” alongside Eli Wallach at the Roundabout Theatre.

Elizondo’s numerous television appearances began with guest starring roles on now classic episodes of “Columbo,” “All in the Family” and “Kojak.” He quickly moved on to star opposite such leading ladies as Michelle Pfeiffer, Sophia Loren, and Anne Bancroft. Hector received another Best Supporting Actor nomination for his riveting performance opposite Ms. Bancroft in the two-character drama “Mrs. Cage,” for PBS’s acclaimed series “American Playhouse.”

Hector has also done many voice-overs, including Ken Burn’s critically acclaimed PBS documentary series, “The West” and served as the host of the CBS special, “Mysterious Man of the Shroud.” Elizondo is especially proud of his involvement in the prestigious LA Theatre Works, a group of 40 top actors who are devoting their time and talent to reinstating classic radio drama as a contemporary art form for National Public Radio (N.P.R.).

Elizondo recently received the Diversity Award’s prestigious “Integrity Award” as well as Nosotros’ “Lifetime Achievement Award “for the quality of roles he has chosen during his career. Elizondo is often asked to be a guest speaker and serve as a role model for children. He is an avid supporter of several charitable organizations including The Alzheimer’s Association, Amnesty International, The American Cancer Society and Pediatric Aids.

Elizondo is an accomplished musician and singer, performing on the conga, flute and guitar. He and his wife Carolee Campbell, an Emmy-Award winning actress, photographer and celebrated publisher live in Sherman Oaks, California.

Catalina Sandino Moreno made her screen debut as the title character in the critically-acclaimed film Maria Full of Grace from Fine Line Features/HBO

Catalina Sandino Moreno (Hildebranda Sanchez)

Catalina Sandino Moreno made her screen debut as the title character in the critically-acclaimed film Maria Full of Grace from Fine Line Features/HBO.
For her performance, Sandino was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, a Screen Actors Guild Award for Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role and won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. The film debuted in the U.S. at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and opened in limited release in July 2004. The film won the Grand Special Prize at the 2004 Deauville Film Festival. Sandino has earned other awards and nominations for her performance, including the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Actress at the 2004 Berlin International Film Festival, the Golden Space Needle Award for Best Actress at the 2004 Seattle International Film Festival and the award for Breakthrough Actor at the 2004 Gotham Awards. She was named ShoWest’s International Star of the Year for 2005.

In October, she will begin shooting the two-part biographical film about Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara who will be played by Benicio Del Toro. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the film will be divided into two parts – Guerilla and The Argentine. Sandino will play the role of Che Guevara’s wife.

She was recently seen in the Antonio Cuadri period piece, The Heart of the Earth. The film surrounds the tensions that mount in an Andalusia mining town between local Spanish workers and their British employers. The film premiered in Spain on April 13th, 2007.

Sandino also recently starred in the Ethan Hawke directed film, The Hottest State. The film, which also stars Ethan Hawke, Laura Linney, Michelle Williams and Mark Webber, tells the story of a young actor from Texas (Webber) who is trying to make it in New York while struggling in his relationship with a beautiful singer/songwriter (Sandino). The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2006.

Sandino co-starred in the highly-anticipated Fast Food Nation. Directed by Richard Linklater, Fast Food Nation is an ensemble piece examining the health risks involved in the fast food industry and its environmental and social consequences as well. The film is a fictional take on the non-fiction, best selling novel by Eric Schlosser and also stars Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale and Greg Kinnear. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was released by 20th Century Fox.

Born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1981, Sandino became interested in theatre and stage at an early age. In 1997, while still in high school, she enrolled in the Ruben Di Pietro theatre academy in Bogotá. During her four years at the academy, she acted in such productions as "Acuerdo para Cambiar de Casa" by Griselda Gambaro, "The Dark Room" by Tennessee Williams, and "Laughing Wild" by Christopher Durang.

After making her film debut in Maria Full of Grace, Sandino relocated to New York City, where she attended The Lee Strasberg Institute. She made her New York stage debut in the Frog & Peach Theatre Company's production of Shakespeare's "King John."

In September 2006, Sandino completed production in Sao Paolo Brazil for Journey to the End of the Night written and directed by Eric Eason, co-starring Brendan Fraser and Mos Def. Upon completion, she went to Paris to shoot Paris, je t'aime with director Walter Salles. The film is about the plurality of cinema in Paris, the City of Love. Twenty filmmakers, including the Coen brothers, Alexander Payne and Wes