Former UK distribution firm Feature Film Company has been re-launched as an independent production, finance and consultancy company with an adaptation of football hooligan bestseller Running With the Firm.
Led by Mick Southworth and Martin McCabe, Feature Film Company has announced the start of pre-production for James Bannon’s memoir about his time as an undercover cop in the 1980s, which saw him infiltrate some of English football’s most brutal hooligan gangs.
A joint venture with its new UK funding partner Omeira - which is providing a minimum £10m of production investment in the first year – the Feature Film Company will initially produce up to four low to medium budget, commercially-oriented ‘genre’ movies a year for theatrical release in the UK and international sales worldwide.
Running With The Firm gets close to some of the more notorious figures from football’s most infamous gangs, revealing details of secret police operations that were meant to bring them down...
Led by Mick Southworth and Martin McCabe, Feature Film Company has announced the start of pre-production for James Bannon’s memoir about his time as an undercover cop in the 1980s, which saw him infiltrate some of English football’s most brutal hooligan gangs.
A joint venture with its new UK funding partner Omeira - which is providing a minimum £10m of production investment in the first year – the Feature Film Company will initially produce up to four low to medium budget, commercially-oriented ‘genre’ movies a year for theatrical release in the UK and international sales worldwide.
Running With The Firm gets close to some of the more notorious figures from football’s most infamous gangs, revealing details of secret police operations that were meant to bring them down...
- 3/6/2014
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
As the Icelandic Film Fund is battling proposed government cuts of 40% for 2014, a group of filmmakers has signed a statement of support for the Icelandic industry.
The supporters include Clint Eastwood, Darren Aronofsky and Terrence Malick, whose films Flags of Our Fathers, Noah and Tree Of Life have all shot partially in Iceland.
As Screen previously reported, more than 200 jobs could be lost because of the proposed cuts. In its 2014 budget, the Icelandic government is proposing a 40% cut to the Icelandic Film Fund, the organisation that supports Icelandic filmmaking through screenwriting, development and production grants. This is the second time in recent years that the Icelandic government has planned to deliver such a blow to local industry — In 2010 the government had proposed a 35% cut to the fund, but eventually enacted 25%.
The second round of budget talks will be held on Dec 13 (Friday) with the final bill to be voted on next week.
The letter...
The supporters include Clint Eastwood, Darren Aronofsky and Terrence Malick, whose films Flags of Our Fathers, Noah and Tree Of Life have all shot partially in Iceland.
As Screen previously reported, more than 200 jobs could be lost because of the proposed cuts. In its 2014 budget, the Icelandic government is proposing a 40% cut to the Icelandic Film Fund, the organisation that supports Icelandic filmmaking through screenwriting, development and production grants. This is the second time in recent years that the Icelandic government has planned to deliver such a blow to local industry — In 2010 the government had proposed a 35% cut to the fund, but eventually enacted 25%.
The second round of budget talks will be held on Dec 13 (Friday) with the final bill to be voted on next week.
The letter...
- 12/12/2013
- by wendy.mitchell@screendaily.com (Wendy Mitchell)
- ScreenDaily
For those looking to get Benedict Cumberbatch ahead of the pack you can watch him this February in the HBO-bbc miniseries Parade’s End and now the network has released a teaser trailer for the five-part Wwi-era miniseries.
Cumberbatch has plenty on his plate for this year or so and now he continues ‘amazing run’ with Parade’s End starring as Christopher Tietjens, a man caught in a love triangle with two women played by Rebecca Hall and Adalaide Clemens.
Written by Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Anna Karenina), the adaptation of Madox Ford’s novel series will be directed by Susanna White.
American audiences will get to experience the upper-class Edwardian-era Britain across three consecutive nights starting on Tuesday, February 26th, 2013.
Hit the jump to check out the video below beginning with Cumberbatch’s character announcing that he’s joining the army.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Cumberbatch has plenty on his plate for this year or so and now he continues ‘amazing run’ with Parade’s End starring as Christopher Tietjens, a man caught in a love triangle with two women played by Rebecca Hall and Adalaide Clemens.
Written by Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Anna Karenina), the adaptation of Madox Ford’s novel series will be directed by Susanna White.
American audiences will get to experience the upper-class Edwardian-era Britain across three consecutive nights starting on Tuesday, February 26th, 2013.
Hit the jump to check out the video below beginning with Cumberbatch’s character announcing that he’s joining the army.
Click here to view the embedded video.
- 1/5/2013
- by Nick Martin
- Filmofilia
Filming has just started on Parade's End a five part serial for BBC2 / HBO, adapted by Sir Tom Stoppard from the novels by Ford Madox Ford, directed by Susanna White, and produced by David Parfitt and Selwyn Roberts. The series will shoot in England and Belgium until December.
Benedict Cumberbatch will star as English aristocrat Christoper Tietjens, Rebecca Hall (currently to be seen in The Awakening) will play his wife Sylvia.
21 year old Australian rising star Adelaide Clemens has been cast as Valentine, the high-spirited young suffragette with whom Christopher falls head-over-heels in love.
Parade's End is the story of a destructive love triangle, set against the backdrop of a society on the brink of catastrophe. As the comfortable certainties of Edwardian England give way to the chaos and destruction of the First World War, English aristocrat Christopher Tietjens finds himself marrying Sylvia, a beautiful but cruel socialite who is...
Benedict Cumberbatch will star as English aristocrat Christoper Tietjens, Rebecca Hall (currently to be seen in The Awakening) will play his wife Sylvia.
21 year old Australian rising star Adelaide Clemens has been cast as Valentine, the high-spirited young suffragette with whom Christopher falls head-over-heels in love.
Parade's End is the story of a destructive love triangle, set against the backdrop of a society on the brink of catastrophe. As the comfortable certainties of Edwardian England give way to the chaos and destruction of the First World War, English aristocrat Christopher Tietjens finds himself marrying Sylvia, a beautiful but cruel socialite who is...
- 9/16/2011
- by noreply@blogger.com (ScreenTerrier)
- ScreenTerrier
HBO and BBC have given the green light to Parade's End, a five-part miniseries set during World War I, written by Oscar winner Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare In Love) and starring British actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall. The mini will be directed by Susanna White, Emmy nominee for her work on another HBO mini set during a war, Generation Kill. Parade's End is based on the series of four books by British novelist Ford Madox Ford, which were published between 1924-28. Set against the backdrop of World War I, it tells the story of a complex and destructive love triangle among a conservative English aristocrat (Cumberbatch), his beautiful but cruel socialite wife (Hall), and a vibrant young suffragette. The mini, executive produced by Michele Buck and Damien Timmer, is slated to begin production in the fall. Selwyn Roberts and David Parfit will serve as producers. Cumberbatch, who plays Sherlock Holmes on the BBC series Sherlock,...
- 6/3/2011
- by NELLIE ANDREEVA
- Deadline TV
From the heroine taunting the bad guy about his "halitosis" to a juvenile reliance on the F-word to get laughs and show off its irreverent attitude, "Plunkett & Macleane" is a dunderheaded exercise in dusting off the classics with a blowtorch, so to speak, resulting in a cultural and historical fantasy that resembles -- in all the usual bad ways and few of the good ones -- the kind of vacuous-but-entertaining Hollywood product it's modeled on.
With only the sparingly used Liv Tyler as a marquee name, the USA Films release seems destined for a quick heave onto the rubbish pile of bad ideas that were made into particularly noxious final products. The blame for this one doesn't fall on the talented performers but rather the filmmaking team led by Jake Scott (son of director Tony Scott), making his feature debut after directing music videos and commercials.
A dismal attempt to transplant the buddy action movie into an age of flintlocks and stagecoaches, portraying two real-life criminals in England some 250 years ago, "Plunkett & Macleane" is not funny, sexy or bloody enough by several degrees. Leads Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller seek but rarely come close to finding a balance between tolerable period characterizations and shameless pandering to modern audience expectations.
While not exactly the stuff of "Braveheart", the source material about "gentleman highwayman" James Macleane (Miller) and his low-class partner Will Plunkett (Carlyle) is ripe with opportunities to make a solid period drama with action, romance, comedy and politics -- say "Barry Lyndon" sped up a little, but not too much. Scott, three screenwriters and seven producers and executive producers (including actor Gary Oldman and original scribe Selwyn Roberts) have instead made another slick, soulless costumer in the same minor league as "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and the most recent "The Three Musketeers".
The movie swings both ways -- like one of its most lively major characters does in a sexual way (Alan Cumming's prissy Lord Rochester) -- between the central duo getting the treatment of rebel rockers and the truncated storytelling that embroils them in an intrigue involving one of their victims, the Lord Chief Justice Gibson (Michael Gambon). Some hope briefly emerges when the important man's niece, Lady Rebecca Tyler), gets Macleane all excited and determined to enter high society. Now if he can just stop himself from donning a mask and wolfishly robbing the rich at gunpoint.
But even the sexy stuff is rushed, while another blaring example of the filmmakers' cheerful use of cliches is the villain, lawman Chance (Ken Stott). He's cruel and merciless and out to bust the daring lads, but he also has a role in deadly political schemes that could hardly be less involving or more sketchily dealt with. Even the finale involving an execution and running fight through the sewers is momentarily rousing at best.
The would-be star of the movie is clearly Scott, and his pump-it-up approach to the milieu includes rapid-fire editing, extremely poor choices in music and frequently working the actors into a sweat, but all to little avail. The story of "Plunkett & Macleane" seems primarily to be an excuse for reinventing the history of fashion and unleashing antique ballistics in scenes of silly, overblown violence.
PLUNKETT & MACLEANE
USA Films
Gramercy Pictures presents
in association with the Arts Council of England
A Working Title production
Director: Jake Scott
Screenplay: Robert Wade, Neal Purvis, Charles McKeown
Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Rupert Harvey
Executive producers: Gary Oldman, Douglas Urbanski, Selwyn Roberts, Matthew Stillman
Director of photography: John Mathieson
Production designer: Norris Spencer
Editor: Oral Norrie Ottey
Costumes: Janty Yates
Music: Craig Armstrong
Casting: Jina Jay
Color/stereo
Cast:
James Macleane: Jonny Lee Miller
Will Plunkett: Robert Carlyle
Lady Rebecca Gibson: Liv Tyler
Lord Rochester: Alan Cumming
Chance: Ken Stott
Lord Chief Justice Gibson: Michael Gambon
Running time -- 101 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
With only the sparingly used Liv Tyler as a marquee name, the USA Films release seems destined for a quick heave onto the rubbish pile of bad ideas that were made into particularly noxious final products. The blame for this one doesn't fall on the talented performers but rather the filmmaking team led by Jake Scott (son of director Tony Scott), making his feature debut after directing music videos and commercials.
A dismal attempt to transplant the buddy action movie into an age of flintlocks and stagecoaches, portraying two real-life criminals in England some 250 years ago, "Plunkett & Macleane" is not funny, sexy or bloody enough by several degrees. Leads Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller seek but rarely come close to finding a balance between tolerable period characterizations and shameless pandering to modern audience expectations.
While not exactly the stuff of "Braveheart", the source material about "gentleman highwayman" James Macleane (Miller) and his low-class partner Will Plunkett (Carlyle) is ripe with opportunities to make a solid period drama with action, romance, comedy and politics -- say "Barry Lyndon" sped up a little, but not too much. Scott, three screenwriters and seven producers and executive producers (including actor Gary Oldman and original scribe Selwyn Roberts) have instead made another slick, soulless costumer in the same minor league as "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" and the most recent "The Three Musketeers".
The movie swings both ways -- like one of its most lively major characters does in a sexual way (Alan Cumming's prissy Lord Rochester) -- between the central duo getting the treatment of rebel rockers and the truncated storytelling that embroils them in an intrigue involving one of their victims, the Lord Chief Justice Gibson (Michael Gambon). Some hope briefly emerges when the important man's niece, Lady Rebecca Tyler), gets Macleane all excited and determined to enter high society. Now if he can just stop himself from donning a mask and wolfishly robbing the rich at gunpoint.
But even the sexy stuff is rushed, while another blaring example of the filmmakers' cheerful use of cliches is the villain, lawman Chance (Ken Stott). He's cruel and merciless and out to bust the daring lads, but he also has a role in deadly political schemes that could hardly be less involving or more sketchily dealt with. Even the finale involving an execution and running fight through the sewers is momentarily rousing at best.
The would-be star of the movie is clearly Scott, and his pump-it-up approach to the milieu includes rapid-fire editing, extremely poor choices in music and frequently working the actors into a sweat, but all to little avail. The story of "Plunkett & Macleane" seems primarily to be an excuse for reinventing the history of fashion and unleashing antique ballistics in scenes of silly, overblown violence.
PLUNKETT & MACLEANE
USA Films
Gramercy Pictures presents
in association with the Arts Council of England
A Working Title production
Director: Jake Scott
Screenplay: Robert Wade, Neal Purvis, Charles McKeown
Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Rupert Harvey
Executive producers: Gary Oldman, Douglas Urbanski, Selwyn Roberts, Matthew Stillman
Director of photography: John Mathieson
Production designer: Norris Spencer
Editor: Oral Norrie Ottey
Costumes: Janty Yates
Music: Craig Armstrong
Casting: Jina Jay
Color/stereo
Cast:
James Macleane: Jonny Lee Miller
Will Plunkett: Robert Carlyle
Lady Rebecca Gibson: Liv Tyler
Lord Rochester: Alan Cumming
Chance: Ken Stott
Lord Chief Justice Gibson: Michael Gambon
Running time -- 101 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 10/1/1999
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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