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Clooney, WB get in ‘Crisis’ mode
Warner Bros. Pictures has scooped up the feature remake rights to Rachel Boynton’s political docu “Our Brand Is Crisis” for George Clooney’s shingle Smoke House to produce and Brit scribe Peter Straughan to adapt.
As with any Smoke House project, “Crisis” is a potential directing and starring vehicle for Clooney.
Warners and Smoke House, based at the studio, intend to reimagine Boynton’s film — about the dangers of “exporting” American democracy — as a dark comedy.
“Crisis” is a behind-the-scenes look at the Bolivian presidential election of 2002, when candidate Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (aka Goni) hired James Carville’s Washington, D.C.-based political consulting firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner to help him win. Goni’s poll numbers were dismal, with Bolivians accusing him of being too closely aligned with U.S. interests.
Employing the same tactics they do in the U.S., Carville — who himself flew in — and his team used focus groups, sloganeering and smear tactics. Goni won by a narrow margin, but the work had only just begun for Carville’s team. Bolivia descended into crisis under Goni’s rule, and he was ultimately forced to resign.
Producers are Clooney and his Smoke House partner Grant Heslov. Smoke House’s Nina Wolarsky brought in the project.
Boynton’s docu, which played in New York and Los Angeles in 2006, was exec produced by Steven Shainberg, Robert Kravis and Sanders Goodstein.
Straughan, who has earned strong notices in the U.K., penned the upcoming “Mrs. Ratcliff’s Revolution” for the BBC and Warner Bros. Intl. He’s adapting the Toby Young tome “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” for Film Four and Michael Collins’ tome “The Resurrectionists” for Miramax and Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack’s Mirage Enterprises.
Smoke House projects include “Leatherheads,” which Clooney is directing and starring in. Pic is presently lensing.
Creative Artists Agency repped the docu. Straughan is repped by CAA and Casarotto Ramsay & Associates in the U.K.
Author: By PAMELA MCCLINTOCK, ADAM DAWTREY
Source: Variety
Ocean’s 13 Update: The Stars Come Out
One of the most anticipated summer movies, Ocean’s 13, will get its first screening here on June 6th.
Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Andy Garcia, Don Cheadle, Ellen Barkin, Matt Damon and the film’s producer Jerry Weintraub, who will also be honored with the CineVegas Vanguard Producers Award, will attend the Las Vegas premiere at the Brenden theaters in the Palms to kickoff this year’s CineVegas.
It will also be a fundraiser for Weintraub’s charity benefiting Darfur. Ocean’s Thirteen will be seen for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival in May and the Hollywood premiere is set for June 5. After the Vegas screening another charity fundraiser for Darful will be held June 7 in Chicago.
The movie will kick off CineVegas two days earlier than the originally- planned opening night of the film festival.
Also starring in the casino-heist movie are Al Pacino, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner, Elliot Gould, Eddie Izzard and Caesars Palace headliner Celine Dion as herself!
Scenes were shot at The Bellagio, the under-construction Palazzo tower at the Venetian, and McCarran International Airport.
Dancer leaps at chance to appear in Clooney movie ‘Leatherheads’
Twenty-six-year-old Dana Ribelin owns and operates To The Pointe Dance Co. across Depot Street from the Salisbury train station, but she never dreamed that location would put her in a movie with heartthrob actor George Clooney.
She’s seen him, of course, and like the rest of the world she knows he’s one good-looking man.
But now all of a sudden she knows she’s going to meet him in person when production of the movie, “Leatherheads,” starring Clooney, begins at the Salisbury train station.
Maria Thomson of Salisbury was cast as an extra in “Leatherheads” when she drove to Tobaccoville, a town in the Yadkin Valley area, last Wednesday for her role as a passenger on a train car.
And Dana Ribelin will be on that same car on the train for three days of the first week, she says, “and a fan in the audience for six days on the second week”of filming, “and that will take place at the American Legion Memorial Stadium in Charlotte.”
And she admits she’s excited.
“It will be a first time ever new experience,” she says. “The pay isn’t great — $7 an hour for the first eight hours and then $10.50 an hour for any time over that. They’ve said it could be early, early morning until late at night.”
And she hopes she’ll meet George Clooney today.
“I know I’ll get to meet him because he’s directing the movie as well as acting in it.”
And she figures she may need some directing.
“I’ve never done any acting or been in a movie. I dance and sing a little.”
But she has danced much more than a little and now owns and operates her dance studio on Depot Street — and that’s why she’s going to be part of the Clooney movie.
Jason A. King , location assistant for the movie crew, dropped by her To the Pointe Dance Co. a couple of weeks ago, she says, “because he had to talk to the businesses around the depot. He wanted to let us know” what the movie company was going to be doing in the area.
“And I heard they were doing casting calls,” but she had to work in her own business, “so I asked him about it, and he gave me a phone number to call but he said, ‘We don’t have any more casting calls, but you can send us a head shot.’ “
And maybe she’d get chosen, he said.
It was a new idea, and Dana’s life is busy enough.
She’s doing all the teaching and running her dance studio with the help of her family, including her mother, Deanie Ribelin, occasionally her brother, Matt Ribelin, and her dad, Kyle, and she’s raising her 10-month-old daughter alone since her divorce, and working as a photographer Wednesday mornings and Saturdays and Sundays at Sears in Concord — and doing well at all of it.
“So I sent in a head shot, and I didn’t expect to hear anything at all until a man named Daniel called and left a message. He said he was looking for someone like me and wanted me to come by for a fitting, but I couldn’t go because I had to teach at that time.”
But he also told her he could use an 8-by-10 photograph.
“And he said he’d need me for nine days of shooting,” and she was able to arrange for substitute teachers for her dance classes, so she was in — except she was a blonde, and the movie representative, Daniel, said they wanted a brunette.
But she got the most important call last Wednesday.
“Daniel called and told me to go to Statesville and get my hair cut, that I had to be available nine certain days for shooting, and her hair color had to change. But the people in Statesville didn’t do anything about the color. I thought they might do it there, but they just told me what kind of dye to get and what to do.”
And she did it herself.
The cutting hurt just a little, she says. She was trying to grow her long blonde hair out longer “because my daughter likes to hold it. But I cut it for the movie.”
And she was outfitted with a costume in Statesville, too.
But so far she hasn’t run into anyone else from Salisbury who’s going to be in it, and she’s been told that they’ll be shooting the movie at the station here Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
“It’s neat,” she says, “to be right here, across the street. I’ll be in there teaching dance, and mom will say, ‘They brought fake trees in today,’ or ‘They brought big lights into today.’ She keeps me up to date. She can see what’s going on.”
And she laughs at another thought.
“They told the extras that everyone has to park on Railroad Street, so everybody else has to walk but I don’t have to because I own this business here, and I park here anyway.”
But she has no idea how many extras the movie folks have hired, and she also stays busy with her own dance business.
She went to Oklahoma City University on a dance and academic scholarship because, her mother says, she wanted to perform in New York and danced with well-known dancers in big city.
But she found that she didn’t want to stay there after working on a dance degree for two years, and she came back home — and just finished her bachelor of arts degree at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte — in dance.
“And I’m happy being a dance teacher,” she says, “but if any other offers come along,” offers that she likes, she won’t turn them down.
She’ll be 27 years old in August, she’s been dancing since she was four years old and she’s taught dancing for eight years.
And she loves it, and some rough years are falling into place now,
She could “never, never, never,” she says, “believe I could have set goals higher than I did but somebody said I needed to set goals higher.
“There were some rough years while they were falling into place,” she says, but this wonderful opportunity to be able to take part in a real movie that stars George Clooney …
“This,” she says, “is the icing on the cake.”
Author: Rose Post (Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com.)
Source: salisburypost.com
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