Michael Bay just posted on his official website that filming is officially underway on Transformers 4. The new Transformers movie will be the first without Shia LaBeouf in a starring role and will instead have Mark Wahlberg (who recently worked with Bay on Pain and Gain) tackling the lead role. Other human actors co-starring with transforming robots this time around include Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Stanley Tucci, Sophia Myles, and Li Bingbing. And in support of the start of filming, Michael Bay and Paramount Pictures have released the first Autobots photos of Optimus Prime as well as the C7 Corvette Stingray and a Bugatti Grand Sport Vitesse from the action movie. The photos were snapped on Highway 163 near Monument Valley.
Transformers 4 arrives on June 14, 2014.
The completely upgraded, custom-built Optimus Prime from Western Star (a subsidiary of Daimler Trucks North America). Photo Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
A special race-inspired C7 Corvette Stingray, based on Chevrolet’s upcoming 2014 production car! Photo Courtesy of Paramount PicturesA classy 1,200-horsepower Bugatti Grand Sport Vitesse worth more than $2.4 million. Photo Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
Amazon left it up to their customers when it came to deciding which of their pilots would move forward as series on Prime Instant Video, and the customers have indicated they’re interested in more of Alpha House, Betas, Annebots, Creative Galaxy and Tumbleaf. The shows, which will be the first-ever original series backed by Amazon Studios, will start shooting soon and will be available later this year and early in 2014.
“We are thrilled at the enthusiastic customer response to our first original pilots,” said Roy Price, Director of Amazon Studios. “We built Amazon Studios so that customers could help decide which stories would make the very best movies and TV shows. It’s exciting to see the process in motion, doing exactly what we set out to do. The success of this first set of pilots has given us the push to try this approach with even more shows—this is just the beginning.”
“We’re thrilled to have emerged safely from this harrowing exercise in online democracy,” stated Garry Trudeau, Alpha House creator. “All of us at Alpha House thank both Amazon and its wise and wonderful customer base for such a happy outcome. As the future of episodic TV packs up and moves to Seattle, we hope the audience will continue to have as much fun watching the show as we have making it.”
And Betas executive producer Michael London said, “After many sleepless nights scrutinizing the number of stars we were getting online, we’re excited that both Amazon and the Amazon customers have given us a vote of confidence to move forward with a full season of Betas. This is only the beginning for our young social media players and we are excited to push them out in the big world to see if they sink or swim.”
“It’s really rewarding to hear that customers loved Creative Galaxy. It has been a passion project for me to bring the best arts and creativity to kids with Amazon, and I’m so excited that kids are going to be able to enjoy a full season of the show early next year,” said Angela C. Santomero, Creator of Creative Galaxy. “We need more innovative kids programming that puts a strong emphasis on creativity and education. I’m proud and honored to be collaborating with Amazon to make these shows for kids.”
Details on Amazon’s New Series:
Alpha House, which stars John Goodman and was written by Academy Award nominee and Pulitzer-Prize winner Garry Trudeau and produced by Elliot Webb and Jonathan Alter, is a comedy about four misfit senators turned unlikely roommates (Clark Johnson, Matt Malloy and Mark Consuelos) who rent a house together in Washington DC.
Set in the land of Silicon Valley start-ups, Betas, written by Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard, follows four friends as they attempt to strike it rich with a new mobile social networking app. Ed Begley Jr., Jon Daly, Joe Dinicol, Charlie Saxton and Karan Soni star in the show. Michael Lehmann will direct and produce the show along with Emmy Award winners Alan Freedland and Alan Cohen, and Academy Award nominee Michael London.
Annebots revolves around Anne, a young scientist, who creates three robot helpers to assist her scientific experiments in the back of her dad’s junkyard. This science-based series from creator J.J. Johnson aims to introduce kids to science and technology in a fun, new way.
Creative Galaxy is an animated interactive art adventure series, designed to inspire kids’ creative thinking through crafts, story, music and dance. The series was created by Angela Santomero, creator of Blue’s Clues and the Emmy-nominated literacy series, Super Why!.
Tumbleaf was created by Drew Hodges and Kelli Bixler of Bix Pix Entertainment, the award-winning stop motion studio. The series, aimed at preschoolers, is set in a whimsical land where a small blue fox named Fig plays each day and discovers adventure, friendship and love around every bend. Children will be enriched by narratives that promote play through exploration and scientific thinking.
ABC Family wants more of Melissa & Joey and has picked up the series for a fourth season. The network’s also expanded the third season with additional episodes that will air in 2014.
According to ABC Family, Melissa & Joey will be the network’s first comedy series to reach the 100-episode mark. “One hundred episodes is a great accomplishment for any series, and we are thrilled to give Melissa and Joey the opportunity to achieve this milestone, as they’ve delivered hundreds and hundreds of laughs over the seasons,” stated Kate Juergens, Executive Vice President, Programming and Development and Chief Creative Officer, ABC Family.
Season three premieres on May 29, 2013 at 8pm. The cast is led by Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence and features Taylor Spreitler and Nick Robinson. Season three guest stars include Sterling Knight, Shannon Elizabeth, Trevor Donovan, Marla Sokoloff, Marissa Jaret Winokur, Jaime Pressly and Doris Roberts.
The Plot:
The series follows local politician and former wild child Mel Burke (Hart) who employs down on his luck “manny” Joe Longo (Lawrence) as she raises her teenaged niece (Spreitler) and nephew (Robinson).
Sheryl Crow - Photo Courtesy of Warner Bros. Records
Sheryl Crow first Country album will hit stores on September 10, 2013 via Warner Bros Records. Feels Like Home marks the nine-time Grammy winner’s first complete album in the Country genre and the first single, “Easy,” is already sitting in the Top 20.
Feels Like Home is also the first album in which Crow co-wrote every track with another songwriter.
“It wasn’t until I moved here that I realized what an amazing community it is,” stated Crow on working on the album in Nashville, Tenn. “It’s the thing I’ve been missing my whole career, the feeling of being able to sit around with a guitar and have people know each other’s songs and know songs from people who’ve influenced all of us. When I moved here pretty early on Vince Gill started calling me to do guitar pulls, and I thought, gosh, this is just like heaven on earth down here.”
Feels Like Home Track Listing:
1. Shotgun
2. Easy
3. Give It To Me
4. Drinking
5. Callin’ Me When I’m Lonely
6. Waterproof Mascara
7. Crazy Ain’t Original
8. Nobody’s Business
9. Homesick
10. Homecoming Queen
11. Best Of Times
12. Stay At Home Mother
Agnes Bruckner stars as Anna Nicole Smith in Lifetime’s original movie, Anna Nicole, coming on June 29, 2013 at 8pm. The dramatic film based on the life of the former Playboy centerfold also features Martin Landau, Virginia Madsen, Adam Goldberg, and Cary Elwes, and was directed by Mary Harron (American Psycho).
John Rice and Joe Batteer wrote the script, and the Oscar-producing team of Craig Zadan and Neil Meron joined Judith Verno as producers.
The Plot: Anna Nicole follows the swift rise and fall of Vickie Lynn Hogan (Bruckner), a Texas high school dropout and single mother with dreams of a better life. Realizing the power of her beauty, Vickie accepts a job as a dancer at topless bar, where she changes her name to Anna Nicole Smith and first makes her mark. With a new persona and a shocking marriage to octogenarian millionaire J. Howard Marshall (Landau), Anna’s career blasts off when Playboy features her in a pictorial spread that evokes comparisons to Marilyn Monroe.
But after her husband’s death, Anna’s financial support ends and her hard-partying ways, excessive drinking, drastic weight fluctuation, and endless pill-popping take their toll, inevitably setting the stage for the fading starlet’s tragic descent.
Hungry for celebrity, Anna launches her own hit reality show and soon gives birth to her daughter. But her newfound happiness and positive outlook on life is shattered when her son dies of an overdose while visiting his mother and newborn sister in the hospital. Unable to overcome the devastation over his death, in a tragic twist less than one year later, Anna herself dies of a fatal combination of pills, adding her name to a long list of icons who have succumbed to the temptations of fame.
Kelly Clarkson’s a staff member at a bizarre laboratory that’s trying to analyze a little girl who isn’t stuck in a black and white world in the “People Like Us” music video directed by Chris Marrs Piliero. Clarkson’s pop anthem empowers the underdogs, and the video finds Clarkson helping to break the young girl out of the laboratory and into a world full of vibrant colors.
“People Like Us” is off of Clarkson’s Greatest Hits – Chapter One album released in November 2012. She’s currently busy at work on her Christmas album and getting ready to tour with Maroon 5.
Will Smith and Jaden Smith team up onscreen for the sci-fi thriller After Earth directed by M Night Shyamalan and coming to theaters on May 31, 2013. And in this interview video courtesy of Columbia Pictures, the father and son acting team talk about the appeal of the project, what exactly is ‘ghosting’, and what audiences can expect from After Earth.
The Plot:
A crash landing leaves teenager Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) and his legendary father Cypher (Will Smith) stranded on Earth, 1,000 years after cataclysmic events forced humanity’s escape. With Cypher critically injured, Kitai must embark on a perilous journey to signal for help, facing uncharted terrain, evolved animal species that now rule the planet, and an unstoppable alien creature that escaped during the crash. Father and son must learn to work together and trust one another if they want any chance of returning home.
Dane Cook, Brad Garrett, Teri Hatcher, Cedric the Entertainer, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus lend their voices to Disney’s Planes (think Cars but with airplanes) directed by Klay Hall. Landing in theaters on August 9, 2013, Planes also includes characters voiced by John Cleese, Carlos Alazraqui, Priyanka Chopra, Gabriel Iglesias, Roger Craig Smith, Colin Cowherd, Sinbad, Oliver Kalkofe, Brent Musburger, Anthony Edwards, and Val Kilmer.
The Plot:
From above the world of Cars comes Disney’s Planes, an action-packed 3D animated comedy adventure featuring Dusty (voice of Dane Cook), a plane with dreams of competing as a high-flying air racer. But Dusty’s not exactly built for racing—and he happens to be afraid of heights. So he turns to a seasoned naval aviator who helps Dusty qualify to take on the defending champ of the race circuit. Dusty’s courage is put to the ultimate test as he aims to reach heights he never dreamed possible, giving a spellbound world the inspiration to soar.
Strange as it sounds, writer/director Zal Batmanglij and writer/actress Brit Marling (Sound of My Voice) actually lived like the nomads portrayed in their latest collaboration – including foraging food from trash cans – but not as preparation for The East. They did it before they had any idea one of their upcoming films would be about a group of environmental anarchists who attempt to strike back at corporations abusing the environment. And in our exclusive interview in support of Fox Searchlight’s The East opening in theaters on May 31, 2013, Batmanglij gives us a look behind-the-scenes at the captivating thriller which explores important, timely issues:
You and Brit went off the grid before you even wanted to do this film. Why did you do that?
Zal Batmanglij: “Well, we’d hit a wall. We’d moved out to Los Angeles so that I could go to film school and so that Brit could pursue an acting career. I graduated with an MFA [Master of Fine Art] in directing, but no gives you a directing job.
Brit had been pounding the pavement trying to break into acting but that didn’t work either. We felt that we were broke. We didn’t know what we were going to do with our lives and we thought, ‘Let’s just go out and have an adventure. Let’s go live a little bit – stop trying so hard and start living.”
But going completely off the grid isn’t just going out and having an adventure. That’s putting everything about your life on hold or abandoning it.
Zal Batmanglij: “Well we didn’t have any money so we couldn’t go somewhere fancy. We couldn’t even go backpack in Asia or Europe or anything. I guess the hardest part was I was probably 28, and taking 28 years of what you know as normal – which is that food in a dumpster is waste, right? – then the hard part is just changing the perception. All you have to do is to tell yourself it’s not waste and that it’s bounty.”
Wow.
Zal Batmanglij: “I know, that was my reaction too.”
What does it take to get into that mindset? I can’t imagine physically going into a trashcan and digging out food.
Zal Batmanglij: “Yeah, but once you learn how to go into it, you realize a dumpster in a grocery store is not filled with rotten eggs or anything, right? It’s filled with packaged food that has to be thrown out; it’s got a date on it. But that packaged food, there’s all this bread, there’s produce, there’s all this bounty. You learn how to pick the lock and then you throw it open.
Of course, we didn’t do this by ourselves. We did this with people who had been doing this for years and had been trained themselves by people older than them and now we were being trained. You go in there and you get that food. You bring the food back in garbage bags or in crates, or whatever, back to the house. We were staying in a squat. Another group of people makes a meal – usually a vegan meal – out of this food and all of a sudden you have lunch. And you know what? A lot of these squats were in bad parts of town. There were kids living in those communities who either their parents were missing or working or were not of sound minds, so the kids were going hungry. All these groups, almost every group we were with invited the local community in and when you see a kid like that eat even the simplest thing, even like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made from the dumpster, you can no longer roll your eyes. I could no longer roll my eyes.”
How do you go back to what we call ‘normal’ life after that?
Zal Batmanglij: “It actually took much longer to re-acclimate then it did to acclimate. It was hard. For months it was hard.”
Why did you give that up?
Zal Batmanglij: “Well, we felt that we wanted to come back and make movies. We didn’t fully give it up. A part of it lives inside of you, but we also wanted to come back and share with people our experiences.”
You didn’t do it in in the first place for a script?
Zal Batmanglij: “No, no, no. No.”
So how much of that, what you actually did off the grid, wound up in the script? Are there people you met that are incorporated into The East?
Zal Batmanglij: “No. I think it’s more the color, the texture… The spin the bottle scene is, but I think it’s more color and texture, and the world. I mean, we wrote Sound Of My Voice first and then wrote The East because we couldn’t shake that experience.”
It seems like The East would be the first one that you would do because you were right there in that world. It’s so immediate.
Zal Batmanglij: “No, we came to make another movie first.”
How does the collaboration work with you and Brit, who’s the co-writer and also the star?
Zal Batmanglij: “Now I think we have it nicely oiled. We are in the trenches together when we are writing. We’re literally partners. There’s nobody else. It’s just us, and we’re very much in it together. Then the next phase, phase two, is trying to get the movie financed, which is a very hard phase. That’s like pushing a boulder up hill, so we’re really using a physicality to try to get this thing made. Then, we’ve been lucky there. We’ve twice had the boulder over the hill and start going down and our movies have been greenlit. At that point Brit goes to do the considerable homework of preparing to play Maggie or Sarah, and I go to work on my crew to prepare to direct the movie – you know, with the production design, and the DP, and all the great people on this movie. And we meet back up on set, but we meet as very different positions. She’s an actress and I’m the director and so we never talk about writing when we’re on set.”
Does she change her lines when she’s on set?
Zal Batmanglij: “I always tell all the actors to change their own lines.”
How flexible are you?
Zal Batmanglij: “Very. I like what Woody Allen says, which is, ‘Make it just sound real.’ I don’t care.”
How tough was getting financing on this because of the subject matter?
Zal Batmanglij: “This was incredibly easy, because Fox bought Sound Of My Voice and they read The East and wanted to make it. We just had to decide that it was okay to make it with them.”
So how difficult was the decision to make the deal with Fox?
Zal Batmanglij: “When you look at it from a macro lens it seems like strange bed fellows, but when you meet the people who work at Searchlight…and that’s the important thing to remember about corporations is that they are actual groups of people, real people… and when you meet those people and they’re so passionate about the material, it’s hard not to be seduced.”
Did they have any input? Did they say, “No you can’t push it this far. You can’t do that.”
Zal Batmanglij: “Sure, I mean we made it together. It’s what happens when you make a movie with a studio. It would be naive to say they weren’t involved in it. It was a solid collaboration. I learned a lot.”
Brit and Alexander Skarsgard have terrific chemistry onscreen. Did you know it as soon as you saw them together?
Zal Batmanglij: “No, and I wish I’d taken more advantage of it when we were shooting because I didn’t realize they have such chemistry. If you see them in real life, they have such chemistry.”
Calling on your own experience off the grid, is there anything you knew absolutely had to get in front of the audience while realizing you couldn’t hammer home your point?
Zal Batmanglij: “That’s a very intellectual approach and I wish I thought like that, I just went with what was my experience of traveling and experiencing different groups and also just once you get the pieces moving, they kind of move their own way. You can’t really move them. It’s like, it was so clear Sarah didn’t know what to do with the spoons and the soup – and that’s just that. I wish that she hadn’t been so selfish but she just is, that’s who she is.”
Was that dinner scene with the soup based on a true event?
Zal Batmanglij: “That’s based on a parable that heaven and hell are the same thing. They’re both banquets with people chained. There are long spoons and in hell everybody is reaching for the food but they can’t reach it and they’re suffering and they’re starving, and in heaven everybody’s feeding each other.”
What do you hope audiences are going to walk away thinking?
Zal Batmanglij: “I don’t know. I just hope that they just walk away thinking. You know, I think this movie is a thriller and it’s entertaining and a lot of people say that it keeps them at the edge of their seat, which I’m really glad about. But can it be that and also spark conversations? Get people to talk to each other about things? Just me talking to you about food waste in a dumpster, I can see that you were seeing a new perspective now.”
I do see that differently. I’m not going to try it, but I could see myself doing it. I love the fact that you impacted the people in the community that needed the help. I hadn’t thought about that aspect of it.
'The Voice' judge Usher (Photo by Trae Patton/NBC)
Blake Shelton’s fellow The Voice coach Usher has committed to perform as part of the “Healing in the Heartland: Relief Benefit Concert” to help out those affected by the tornadoes in Oklahoma. Shelton organized the concert and will also headline the benefit, which will air on May 29, 2013 on NBC. The concert will be broadcast at 9pm on NBC as well as on Style, G4, Bravo, E!, and CMT (some channels will air it tape-delayed).
In addition to The Voice‘s Shelton and Usher, Darius Rucker, Luke Bryan, Rascal Flatts, Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic, Miranda Lambert, Reba, and Vince Gill have been added to the lineup. “Everyone has their way to help, and mine as an entertainer is to perform to help raise money and awareness for this tragedy,” Shelton said. “This is why I want to do this special and especially hold it in Oklahoma City, which is near ground zero.”
Funds raised will be donated to the Oklahoma City United Way’s May Tornadoes Relief Fund.
Tickets for the event sold out in five minutes, according to NBC. The concert will take place at the Chesapeake Energy Stadium.
