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National Lampoon’s Animal House is the comedy that changed everything in Hollywood. In honor of its 25th anniversary this year, Josh Karp talked to director John Landis, co-writers Harold Ramis and Chris Miller as well as studio executive Thom Mount to get the full behind-the-scenes picture on this pop culture icon.
Bai Ling talks in metaphor, explains why it's necessary to occasionally eat maggots and makes sense of when 'not thinking' is the best approach to things. Prepare yourself for a ride.
The most upbeat filmmaker you will ever meet gets giddy about his date with Drew Barrymore.
Actor Charlie Hunnam knows what he wants and is doing his best to get it on his own terms. Steering away from what he calls the 'disposable shit' and fighting for the projects that interest him, Hunam's already ahead of the normal Hollywood learning curve.
Whether you know him as Thomas Jane or Tom Jane, the man has been turning heads since he broke into the industry. This may have something to do with his near chameleonic ability to morph in and out of any character he plays.
There are almost an infinite number of questions that can be asked of people. The hardest one to answer? The 'How do I make it?' question. Chris Neumer rolls up his shirt sleeves, investigates this question and answers it. Would be filmmakers take note, you're not going to see this anywhere else.
Thanks to the American public's intense fascination with A-List celebrity, it's been getting harder than ever to find articles on Hollywood actresses who don't have have the last names of Kidman, Jolie and Aniston. While debating this press disparity, I realized that most people would jump at the chance to learn about what life was life for Jolie prior to her cracking the most elite levels of Hollywood. And thus an article idea was born.
Jeff Nathanson made a name for himself scripting Rush Hour 2, Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal. Moving from behind the typewriter to behind the camera for the first time on The Last Shot, Chris Neumer sat down with Nathanson to talk about the craziness that is today’s Hollywood.
Jesse Jane is one of the adult world's biggest stars. So big, in fact, her movies are being stripped of the sex and released as R-rated films. Jane talks shop and gets inside the actual filmmaking of her films.
Actor Josh Lucas has anchored the casts of movies both big (Glory Road and Poseidon) and small (Undertow and Little Murder). More impressively, he has done so while making a name for himself as a stylish, intelligent and charismatic on-screen force.
A fan of comic books, superheroes and a screenwriter who is rapidly rising in the Hollywood ranks, Kevin Grevioux is nothing like you'd ever expect.
Renowned French writer/director Luc Besson is retiring. There are, however, enough asterisks and footnotes to that statement that the movie-going public doesn’t need to worry about an absense of Besson in any conventional sense.
From very early on in his …
It's noon in Beverly Hills and
Super Size Me writer/director Morgan Spurlock is hungry. Something interesting is guaranteed to happen.
Actor Michael Rispoli is a rarity in celebrity-obsessed Hollywood: he is a supporting actor in feature films who recognizes that you don’t have to be a major star to be a successful actor.
The very nature of the entertainment world suggests that there will be some fast rising (and falling) stars. Not everyone can sustain the momentum that Harrison Ford and Julia Roberts have had. However, while the music industry welcomes these one-hit wonders with open arms, the film world has a slightly different approach. Chris Neumer investigates...
As the Academy honors the best of the year that was, Chris Neumer gets inside the evening's events from a comfortable place on his couch.
It was a night of many surprises, the best, naturally, being The Three 6 Mafia's Oscar win. Has anyone else ever dropped the 'N' word in an acceptance speech? With the year's biggest award show on hand,
Stumped? kept a running diary of the night's events, complete with more commentary than we thought possible.
Disappointed with some aspects of his more recent films, writer/director Phil Joanou got personal and created the autobiographical work of art, Entropy.
In 1996, director Phil Joanou’s film Heaven’s Prisoners, starring Alec Baldwin and Kelly Lynch, was released …
It was probably inevitable, but 'filmmakers' are now shooting projects on their cell phones.
There are a lot of ways for a journalist to get rejected in Hollywood. Chris Neumer details three of his personal favorites here. (And by personal favorites, he means the three most soul-crushing, comically over-the-top rejections that he wouldn't believe if they hadn't happened to him)
Stephen Tobolowsky is the actor who has been in everything. Now he's branching out into documentaries.
The core idea behind director Michael Hoffman’s surprisingly underrated film Soapdish is that the behind-the-scenes lives of the actors working on a soap opera were far more bizarre, comical and horrendously managed than anything fictional that a group of writers …
The Summer of 2010 is officially behind us. Chris Neumer looks back at Hollywood's most profitable season, notices some strange trends, hands out some awards including the best and worst movie of summer as well as the "Yeah That's Not Going to Cause Any Problems" and the "What the Hell is Going On?" awards. All that and a look into how Piranha 3D got an R rating.
Considering his first-hand experiences with ghosts, it's no surprise that Korean director Tae-kyeong Kim is a rising star in the horror world. Kevin Withers investigates.
It takes a lot more than one might imagine to secure locations and shoot in New York City. Veteran location manager John Fedynich (Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2) takes Chris Neumer on his own location scouting expedition and together the two find the perfect Manhattan alley, stumble into some intriguing neighborhoods and deal with unexpected problems. After this article, you'll never look at that Fifth Avenue setting in the same way again.
Superhero movies earn more money than almost any genre of films. From The Dark Knight to Spiderman to Iron Man, these comic book adaptations rake in box office. Chris Neumer investigates the strangest superhero movie of all time, Batman: The Movie. Prepare yourself for one hell of a... trip.
As I started to write this Summer 2010 recap, my first step was to begin talking about how it was yet another strange summer for movies. It was my first reaction to the summer that was. After several sentences, I …
Thomas F. Wilson's instant sucess in
Back to the Future enabled him to quickly gain perspective on stardom. The results may surprise you.
Thomas Lennon gets deep inside the nature of funny and why it doesn’t quite mesh well within the confines of the studio system.
For some people, being funny is simply an amusing character trait. For Thomas Lennon, being funny is, …
How many industries reward abject failure? Not many. Interestingly, Hollywood is one... particularly when it comes to screenwriters. Chris Neumer delves into the sweet, sweet smell of... horrible failure.
:37 Kelly McGillis, where have you gone? I’m looking at her filmography and since Top Gun, I have heard of only three movies that McGillis has appeared in; The Accused, The Babe and North. I’m not sure …
The film world is filled with lots of great stories of creativity, artistic triumphs and wonderful feel-good accomplishments. This is not one of them. This is the story of one rookie filmmaker's hell. What makes Michael Ian Black's story unique is that this hell all happened after his movie was picked up for distribution.
In director Paul W. S. Anderson’s latest film, Alien vs. Predator (AvP), actor Carsten Norgaard is trying to do something that only two men, Danny Glover and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have succeeded in doing previously: fight the extraterrestrial known as the Predator and live to talk about it. Norgaard has his work cut out for him and is well aware of this.
