News

Judith James, producer of “Quiz Show” and “Mad Dog Time” and Richard Dreyfuss’ longtime collaborator, died in Santa Barbara after a bout with cancer. She was 86.

James’ friend, Alex. B Block, confirmed the news to Variety.

James’ was an accomplished producer who worked alongside Dreyfuss on projects including “Funny, You Don’t Look 200: A Constitutional Vaudeville,” “Prisoner of Honor” and “The Lightkeepers.”

“From the minute I met Judy James at the Mark Taper Forum, I knew I had found someone who had the same passion for storytelling that I did,” Dreyfuss said in a statement. “In all the years we were producing partners, we were of like mind, not gender, and we always found a way to agree and wouldn’t have done anything without each other’s approval. She was a wonderful woman and a great friend.”

James was born in Worcester, Mass., and graduated from Vassar College...

Judith James, a film, TV and Broadway producer who was Richard Dreyfuss’ producing partner for many years and worked on such projects as Quiz Show, Mr. Holland’s Opus and Eleanor: In Her Own Words, has died July 14 of cancer in Santa Barbara, CA. She was 86.

Her son, Jackson James, revealed the news.

“From the minute I met Judy James at the Mark Taper Forum [in Los Angeles], I knew I had found someone who had the same passion for storytelling that I did,” The Goodbye Girl Oscar winner Dreyfuss said in a statement. “In all the years we were producing partners, we were of like mind, not gender, and we always found a way to agree and wouldn’t have done anything without each others’ approval. She was a wonderful woman and a great friend.”

Born Judith Rutherford, James moved to New York after college to pursue a career in theater. She...

Judith James, the longtime producing partner of Richard Dreyfuss who worked with the Oscar winner on films including Mr. Holland’s Opus, Quiz Show and Mad Dog Time, has died. She was 86.

James died Friday at her home in Santa Barbara after a bout with cancer, according to her son, Jackson James.

James and Dreyfuss worked together for 35 years, and their partnership also included the telefilms Funny, You Don’t Look 200: A Constitutional Vaudeville and the Prisoner of Honor, which aired in 1987 and 1991, respectively, and The Lightkeepers (2009). They were co-writers on You Don’t Look 200 as well.

“From the minute I met Judy James at the Mark Taper Forum, I knew I had found someone who had the same passion for storytelling that I did,” Dreyfuss said in a statement. “In all the years we were producing partners, we were of like mind, not gender, and we always found...

In a special Thanksgiving episode, “The Masked Singer” determined the last two members of the final Super Six of season 4. The title of the show said it all: “The Group C Finals – The Masks Give Thanks.” The trio of celebrities still standing in this third group performed once again disguised as the Broccoli, Jellyfish and Mushroom. Only two of them made it through to the semi-finals, which will air on December 4.

Since these Group C contestants first performed on October 28, we’ve been busy trying to figure out their true identities. The one name we are most certain of is the star hiding inside the Broccoli costume. Keep reading for all “The Masked Singer” spoilers for season 4, including who Broccoli is.

Broccoli showed off his strong singing voice first on episode 5 with a medley of “House is Rockin’/Whole Lotta Shakin Going On” by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jerry Lee Lewis respectively.

Deran Sarafian is set to direct Trigger Happy, an indie neo-noir thriller that centers around a desperate waitress in a dead-end town who meets the man of her dreams. Only he is not who he seems and neither is she.

Shawn McLaughlin and Mike Mityok co-wrote the screenplay, which is described as an American road cinema of the ‘70s, such as Vanishing Point, Badlands, and neo-noir thrillers like The Long Goodbye, Body Heat, and Blood Simple. McLaughlin is producing with Jaye Gazeley, under their Canadian-based production company Marauder Films, along with Gabrielle Almagor. Filming is slated to commence next year.

Sarafian is a veteran TV director and executive producer, whose credits include House, Swamp Thing, Rosewood, among a number of others. He’s repped by The Gersh Agency and Zero Gravity Management.

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Brian Krause and Rizwan Manji will star in Robert Rosenbaum-helmed drama Basement,...

Louisa Mellor Jul 1, 2016

Not every artist is happy to have their song featured in a particular TV show or film. Here are 17 times the rights were refused...

It's not only political campaigns that inspire musical artists to exercise the power of veto on the use of their songs. For reasons of finance, reputation, ego, taste and more, the following TV shows and films weren't able to secure the use of the recordings they originally sought...

Frank Sinatra – Goodfellas

This Express piece quotes an Empire Magazine interview with Martin Scorsese’s long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker in which she relates how the original plan was to have Frank Sinatra’s original recording of My Way play over the end credits of modern gangster classic Goodfellas instead of the Sid Vicious cover that was eventually used.

“Sinatra would never let Marty use his music,” explains Schoonmaker, “which is too bad because Marty may...

Nis America, the publisher of such cult hits as the Disgaea series, confirmed four new Japanese titles that they’re planning to localize for the West yesterday, at a company keynote presentation in downtown San Francisco.

The biggest surprise of the four may be the announcement of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair for the Vita, mainly due to the fact that its predecessor, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, made its English debut just earlier this week. Currently scheduled for a release sometime this fall in both Europe and North America, Danganronpa 2 will swap out the school setting of Hope’s Peak Academy from the original game for the tropical Jabberwock Island. Series antagonist Monokuma will also return, once again putting several students through a deadly game.

A new version of Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten, titled Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited, was also announced for the Vita, following in the first three...

Japanese games are a special type of weird. You get the insanity of designers like Suda51 and Swery driving an industry that prides itself on mashing together genres in ways that really shouldn’t work, but they wind up doing so anyways.

Enter Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, a Playstation Vita release from Nis that takes the legal drama of Phoenix Wright and transplants it into a private school that’s run by a demonic bear. Oh, and the school is the site of a series of grisly murders, and the students must hold a kangaroo court to try and finger the killer, lest the aforementioned demon bear punish them all with the appropriately Japanese-styled hell.

The launch trailer below outlines some of the lunacy, but I’m sure the game proper will deliver even more distinctly Japanese-flavored insanity than most Western brains can handle.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is out now for Playstation Vita.

Actor Christopher Jones has died at age 72. Once touted as the heir to James Dean, Jones boasted a handsome face and the same type of brooding intensity that had made legends of Dean and Brando. Jones got his first big break in the 1960s Western TV series The Legend of Jesse James but the show lasted only one season. After appearances on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Judd for the Defense, Jones graduated to feature films. He starred in the little-seen 1967 drama Chubasco (click here for review), the hit 1968 Roger Corman production of Wild in the Streets (in which he played a rock star who becomes President of the United States), Three in the Attic and the spy thriller The Looking Glass War. His most high profile role was as a British army officer who falls in a forbidden love affair with an Irish girl in David Lean's 1970 film Ryan's Daughter.

While the Ps Vita release of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc marks the debut of this particular franchise in the West, it’s taken a while for the series to be translated. This particular title is actually a remake of a 2010 PSP game, which has since received a sequel that’s still exclusive to Japan.

Having sunk a good amount of time into this game, I can guess why Nis America chose to localize it at this point. In terms of plot, it’s reminiscent of other titles from its own developer Spike Chunsoft, namely 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, while its gameplay can be compared to Capcom’s popular Ace Attorney series.

Seeing how both those titles have become sleeper hits over here, it makes sense to try releasing a game that acts like a bizarre fusion of the two. That...

‘Ryan’s Daughter’ actor Christopher Jones dead at 72: Quit acting following nervous breakdown after Sharon Tate murder, in later years turned down Quentin Tarantino movie offer Christopher Jones, who had a key role in David Lean’s 1970 romantic epic Ryan’s Daughter, died of complications from gallbladder cancer last Friday, January 31, 2014, at Los Alamitos Medical Center, approximately 35 km southwest of downtown Los Angeles. Christopher Jones (born William Franklin Jones on August 18, 1941, in Jackson, Tennessee) was 72. After growing up in a children’s home, joining the army at 16 and then going Awol, being handpicked by Tennessee Williams for a small role in the playwright’s The Night of the Iguana in 1961, and starring in the television series The Legend of Jesse James (1965-1966), Christopher Jones began getting film roles. His first was the title role in Allen H. Miner’s 1967 clash-of-generations drama Chubasco, in which Jones plays a misunderstood youth...

His star burned briefly but bright. Christopher Jones was a counterculture cult hero in the James Dean mold, starring in Wild In The Streets (1968) as Max Frost, the 22-year old rock star millionaire president of the United States who locks up everyone over 30. The same year he played Paxton Quigley in Three In The Attic, a hit about free love in the swinging sixties costarring Yvette Mimieux and Judy Pace. The big studios took notice and David Lean cast him as the romantic lead in the big-budget drama Ryan’S Daughter (1970). It was on the set of this epic that Jones reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown. His part had to be dubbed and he suddenly dropped out of show biz after only a handful of credits. Quentin Tarantino approached him in 1996 and offered him the role of Zed in Pulp Fiction, but Jones turned him down (Zed would be played...

No one loved movies like Roger Ebert. But perhaps more importantly, no one panned movies like Roger Ebert. He turned taking the piss out of a reprehensible film into an art form, leaving you giggling days later.

While we're heartbroken at his passing, we'll always remember him for his big heart, his humanity, his passion, his fortitude, and, most of all, his incredible wit in the face of so many terrible, terrible cinematic train wrecks.

Here are a few of the funniest Ebert take downs of movies. Let us know which one's your favorite.

North, 1994

"I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it."

Stargate, 1994

"The movie Ed Wood, about the worst director of all time,...

Zombie Studios, the creators of the Blacklight series, have officially released Special Forces: Team X today for PC and Xbla. Players will be able to jump straight into the fast-paced, 3rd person shooter action, which focuses on team-based tactical combat. Granted, this may not sound like entirely new territory for gaming, but the real twist comes when gamers uncover the level of customization that Stx places in the hands of the player.

Prior to each match a real time map selection system pops on screen that divides the battlefield into three distinct zones. The layout of each map is determined by the teams in order to create over one hundred possible combinations for the war zone. This grants each map with the potential to be an entirely new experience, and offer players a constantly changing tactical challenge.

How you play is left entirely up to you. Load-outs offer a variety...

Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean

Written and directed by Matthew Mishory

USA, 2012

Let’s posit a hypothetical – what if the iconic James Dean was gay? Well, let’s answer one hypothetical question with another – what if Fellini made a Dolce & Gabbana commercial instead of La Dolce Vita?

What does one have to do with the other? Absolutely nothing, but that seems to be all that happens in Matthew Mishory’s Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean. A film with plenty of flare but a shocking lack of form, Joshua Tree is all pomp and no circumstance.

Set in his early career, the film follows the life of James Dean (James Preston), from his acting classes in university, to his emergence as an up-and-coming Hollywood prospect. With sequences inspired by sexual speculation, the film interweaves a series of libidinous sketches to form a sensuous, and definitively homoerotic,...

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Max Payne 3 is a game that grabs your attention and refuses to let go. Watching the screen warp into distortion as colors blend together across the screen, drives home the point that each pill Max pops, chased with swigs of Scotch, only feed his addictions further. You become immersed into the mind of a broken man, an addict lost in the past, clutching to his same vices in order to forget the present.

Rockstar has taken the classic noir gaming experience, layered it with their own high level of polish, and implemented a painstaking level of detail. Max Payne 3 draws players into Max’s life with a cinematic flair unrivaled in games today. Great writing, intense action sequences, and an amazing multiplayer component melts together in order to create an amazing piece of cinematic gaming.

Diving into the story takes you on a journey through parts of Max’s life,...

Support the mechanical troops with a new Steel Battalion shirt, a metal tribute to Castlevania, and Final Fantasy Xiii-2 walks the runway in this week's Non-Gaming Game News.

Vomitron pays tribute to classic Nes titles—through metal

It's not a surprise that there's a metal tribute to the first Castlevania, it's a surprise that there aren't more of them. Experimental metal act Vomitron kicks off ten years together with their track "Castlevania," which mixes in some of the themes from Kinuyo Yamashita and Satoe Terashima's score. The song is from their album No Nes For the Wicked which has tracks made in homage to Double Dragon, and The Legend of Zelda II.

You can check out the rest of the album on Vomitron's page (album cover art Nsfw).

Sovtt: Support Our Vertical Tank Troops with this Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor shirt

This just went up over at the Capcom store...

Look out Hollywood, the video game industry is hot on your heels, poaching your talent and raking in the money. And one game has led the way…

The fastest-selling cultural product in history was created by people you've probably never heard of. While this year's Oscars honoured films in which the movie business sweetly congratulates itself on its own birth – The Artist, Hugo – the most dollar-hoovering entertainment release ever is not a film, still less an album; it's a video game. Coming out last autumn, Modern Warfare 3 – a blockbuster military shooter made by a Californian game studio called Infinity Ward – took just 16 days to gross $1bn, beating by one day the previous record set by a film about blue people in space. And it wasn't a freak accident. Global annual sales of video games now dwarf cinema box-office and recorded music: in 2010, games grossed $56bn, film tickets $32bn and music $23bn.

Activision’s chart topping children’s gaming and toy franchise Skylanders is getting Super Sized in 2012. The original series, which used a “Portal of Power” kiosk to allow gamers to hot swap toys into and out of the game, launched in 2011 with Spyro as one of its lead characters.

In New York, Activision’s CEO Eric Hirshberg announced the next iteration of the franchise. Whereas the first game, Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure, used the Spyro the character for promoting the new franchise, the new game Skyladers Giants focuses on branding Skylanders as its own unique title.

Skylanders Giants will feature a new roster of 8 Giants. They are what the TItans were to the Greek gods. They’re double the size of the regular Skylanders and open the game to bigger environment puzzles. The Giants have been around for ages, but thanks to the events in Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure they...

Chicago – The video game publisher Activision has never shied away from charging a little extra for the add-ons of their video games. The publishers of the “Guitar Hero” and “DJ Hero” series, Activision always seems to find a way to create fun and entertaining games that cost more than just the price of a disc.

Video Game Rating: 4.0/5.0

Much like “Guitar Hero” and “DJ Hero,” Activision teamed up with developer Toys For Bob to create “Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure,” a seemingly simple game that will make you fork over some major bills in order to play every adventure and earn every achievement.

The construction of “Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure” is a world where you can play as one of 32 different Portal Masters; characters with special powers and abilities that control a series of portals between different parts of the Skylander world. The characters must fight back against Kaos, an evil...

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

You probably don’t need this review. $400m worth of first day sales says you probably already own the latest addition to the Call of Duty franchise, and if you don’t there’s a good chance you fall exclusively on the side of Battlefield 3 in the fan-propelled Fps war and no amount of good or bad reviews will change your mind either way.

Nevertheless, I purposefully took my time on this one, careful to ignore the hyperbole that invariably spouts from megafans of the series, and derogatory jibes from the anti-mw brigade who have not and will not play a minute of the game in anger.

The timeline of the game immediately follows that of MW2, with the Us torn apart by a Russian invading force, but now beginning to turn the tide, winning back territory as the Russians, lead by the malevolent Makarov, turn...

Dumb Movie Dumb!!

Film: Dum Maaro Dum

Director: Rohan Sippy

Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Prateik, Rana Daggubati, Bipasha Basu

Rating: **

A cop seeking redemption, an airhostess who carries drugs, an innocent kid seeking a scholarship and a handsome local musician oblivious to the sinister going-ons get embroiled in the infamous Goan drug cartel. The goal seems to be the arrest of an elusive drug lord named Michael Barbosa and the canvas is a murky medley of the Russian, Israeli and Nigerian narcotics mafia.

Rohan Sippy?s Dum Maaro Dum is slickly shot, stylishly cut and nicely scored, but is marred by a lazy script that promises rousing thrills but takes unimaginative shortcuts to its ?big? reveals. While the subject has the potential to lend itself to a taut thriller, the outcome is an insipid hotchpotch that offers few thrills and no insights into the dark underbelly of the paradise state. Dmd...

This new season 7 episode opens where it left off last season, with Shane Casey (Edward Furlong) holding Danny (Carmine Giovinazzo) and their baby at gun point in their home. This was Lindsay's (Anna Belknap) attempt to play 'macho woman', now that Stella (Melina Kanakaredes) has gone. No, really, Lindsay has even taken to wearing high-heeled stilettos (one of Stella's traits in the show.) Anyhoo, moving on - this cliff-hanger from last season, wasn't so much a hanging-off-cliff moment, waiting for Lindsay to fire the bullet and put us out of our misery in not having to watch her macho posturing and inflating nostrils, for too long, and kill Casey. This was CSI:ny's (TV) attempt to give this bland character some backbone and make her interesting, failing miserably. It'll never work, Lindsay's not your average Cat (Marg Helgenberger) or Sara (Jorga Fox) from CSI (TV) who can portray bucket loads of...

There has been a lot of chatter re: the Tree of Life trailer. The Terrence Malik film is slated for release in 2011. Nevermind. This is the “fake” trailer. Trigger happy we.

Dom Joly has claimed that a planned movie version of his Trigger Happy TV will be "the Ben Hur of hidden camera" films. The comedian confirmed that he is still planning the project, which he previously described as "the first post-Obama movie". Joly told Metro: "I'm trying to get a Trigger Happy film made. Films take an extraordinary amount of time to get made. "It'll be the Ben Hur (more)...

Cannes 2010 Coverage

David Cairns

The Forgotten: Trigger Happy Punks

The Forgotten: Mood Swings

The Forgotten: Seduced and Abandoned

Adrian Curry

Movie Poster of the Week: "Guns"

Movie Poster of the Week: "Tentacles"

Movie Poster of the Week: "Tropical Malady"

Movie Poster of the Week: "La religieuse"

Daniel Kasman

Image of the Day. Records of Material Objects in the Cinema #1

R.I.P. William Lubtchansky

Images of the Day. Ideal Couples

Cannes 2010. Favorite Moments: Days 1 & 2

Cannes 2010. An Actor-Director and His Women: "Tournée" (Mathieu Amalric, France)

Cannes 2010. 3-Wall Realism: "Tuesday, After Christmas" (Radu Muntean, Romania)

Cannes 2010: Sincere Love: "The Strange Case of Angelica" (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)

Cannes 2010. Favorite Moments: Day 3

Cannes 2010: A Devil without the Details: "Aurora" (Cristi Puiu, Romania)

Cannes 2010. Love-Hate Relationships: "Au petite bonheur" (Marcel L’Herbier, France, 1946)

Cannes 2010. Playful Protest: "Hands Up" (Romain Goupil, France)

Cannes 2010. Favorite Moments: Day 4

Cannes 2010. Today's Quiet City: "I Wish I Knew" (Jia Zhangke,...

Continuing with out DVD-themed day here at FilmShaft, it’s my pleasure to present to you….Hell Ride, a feature length, rough, tough (and not at all sexist) adventure that packs one hell of a punch and makes no apologies!

From Executive Producer Quentin Tarantino (Grindhouse Presents: Death Proof) and Writer, Director, Producer and star Larry Bishop (Mad Dog Time) comes this lean, mean mayhem machine, fully loaded with the three B’s: bikers, beer and booty! Action packed and fueled by pure testosterone, Hell Ride revs it up to DVD and Blu-ray on 12th October 2009 from Warner Home Video.

Larry Bishop takes up the role of Pistolero, head honcho of the Victors, a badass biker gang who are out to avenge the murder of one of their members at the hands of the 666ers, a rival gang who relish living up to their hellish moniker. Alongside his cohorts, the...

Normal 0 false false false En-us X-none X-none MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 By Herbert Shadrak

In 1970, the charismatic actor Christopher Jones (then starring in David Lean’s epic Ryan’s Daughter) turned his back on movie stardom to lead a life of almost total anonymity. Today, Jones is a working artist who specializes in paintings with a classical antiquity theme and in portraits of Hollywood legends such as James Dean – to whom Jones once bore a striking resemblance.

Having studied at the Actors Studio and perfected his craft on episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Naked City, the extraordinarily handsome, Tennessee-born actor moved steadily up the Hollywood ladder through the late sixties. He starred in The Legend of Jesse James – a TV western that lasted through the 1965-66 season – and three B-pictures: the love story Chubasco (in which he appeared with then-wife Susan Strasberg); the sex romp Three in...

Dom Joly has announced that his Trigger Happy TV show will be adapted for the big screen. The comedian said that the tone of the film will be different to that of Sacha Baron Cohen's hit movie Borat, Pa reports. Joly said: "I have just got the first draft. It's weird to write a script because you can't because it's all kind of made up. It's really funny, I'm really excited about it. "We are gonna have a go at doing it in America just because (more)...

You better watch out You better not cry You better have clout I'm telling you why Two Thumbs Down are comin' to town He's making a list,

Checking it twice;

Gonna find out whose

movie was scheiss.

Sandy Claws is comin' to town.

He sees you when you're (bleeping),

He knows when you're a fake

He knows if you've been bad or good

So be good for cinema's sake!

With little but scorn

and pounding of drums,

Rooty toot hoots

and rummy tum thumbs

Sandy Jaws is comin' to town

As I dream back over many happy years of movie going, some of my favorite lines from old reviews dance in my head like visions of sugarplums. Good movies, bad movies, doesn't matter, just so the line dances. I thought I'd share them in the holiday spirit. Curiously, most of the lines come from movies so bad I didn't want a refund,...

Right off the bat, I'll tell you: We didn't even get close to 100 kills. But with two straight hours of violent mayhem that was punctuated only by the nostalgically caustic wit of Mr. Zack Carlson, I'd say this was definitely one of the most entertaining events of the whole damn festival. Plus, c'mon, 100 onscreen kills would take about five hours to appreciate -- and really, the Somewhere Between 35 and 40 Best Kills Party just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Listed below are all the clips that played at the first annual "100" Best Kills Geekfest, contributed by Zack Carlson, Lars Nilsen, and a small handful of loyal Alamo lunatics. If you have any suggestions, leave 'em in the comments section below. I'm sure Zack will want a nice gory list for Ff 2009.

Maniac (1980) -- Savini shotgun blast.Psycho 2 (1983) -- Mother shovel head.Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) -- Something really disgusting.Powder (1995) -- Electric powder sprint.

By Aaron Hillis

Born in Philadelphia and raised in New Jersey, Larry Bishop (son of Rat Pack comic Joey Bishop) began his acting career after high school, working in comedy with friends like Rob Reiner and Richard Dreyfuss. Though he's guest-starred on TV sitcoms like "Laverne & Shirley," "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Barney Miller," Bishop is far better known for being a drive-in theater badass, appearing as an American International Pictures contract player in wild-and-wooly biker flicks like 1968's "The Savage Seven" and 1971's "Chrome and Hot Leather." On an acting hiatus after 1983 (more on that later), Bishop returned to the screen in the mid-'90s with new credits to his name, writing the script for "Underworld" and making his directorial debut, "Mad Dog Time."

Enter exploitation film guru Quentin Tarantino. Understandably a fan of Bishop's Aip years, Tarantino cast him in a bit part for the second volume of "Kill Bill,...

By Neil Pedley

This week's delectable delights include, amongst other things, such highbrow morsels as a gallery retrospective on D.I.Y. art and a crash course in the history of the California vineyards. If that's not your cup of proverbial tea, there's always psychotic bikers and the ballad of two stoned losers on the run from gangsters and the police.

"Beautiful Losers"

More than 15 years after founding the hugely influential Alleged Gallery in New York, the freelance curator Aaron Rose continues to serve as a cornerstone of the now-global D.I.Y. art scene. Here he teams with "Blair Witch" actor-turned-director Joshua Leonard to chart the evolution and subsequent commercialization of a movement whose genesis was found in a group of outcasts, slackers and misfits from the fringes of subculture. Emerging from the dirty little worlds of surfing, skateboarding and street graffiti, a group of artists including the likes of Harmony Korine,...

Though we may have differences about Tarantino's upcoming Inglorious Bastards - whether it should be two movies, whether it's actually going to get made this year - I think we can agree that as a producer or a "presenter," Tarantino has always had a pretty keen eye for the most part.

All I need for proof is Hero, one of the absolute best films from 2004. I'm still not sure exactly what Qt did there, but he put his name on it. He had nothing to do with making the film, though. But there is an art to presenting; witness Vanna White, for instance. Ok, bad example.

This year, Tarantino is "presenting" another film that you would associate him with even if his name wasn't in bold print on the poster, Larry Bishop's Hell Ride. QT is also an executive producer on the film, a position he's held on films...

Comedian Joey Bishop, the last surviving male member of Frank Sinatra's legendary "Rat Pack" who appeared in such films as Ocean's Eleven and Sergeant's 3, died Wednesday night of multiple causes at his home in Newport Beach, CA; he was 89. The Bronx-born Bishop pursued a career in stand-up comedy both before and after World War II, and caught the attention of Sinatra during a Manhattan gig in 1952. Soon after, Bishop was opening for Sinatra's concerts nationwide, and also began appearing in films and on numerous talk shows. He also became a famed member of Sinatra's Rat Pack, which also consisted of Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford and Dean Martin (Shirley MacLaine is also considered something of an honorary member). The male quintet appeared in the 1960 crime caper Ocean's Eleven, and performed nightly at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas during filming; the next year, Bishop was asked to be the emcee for President John F. Kennedy's inaugural ball (produced by Sinatra). Away from the Rat Pack, Bishop starred for four years in the sitcom The Joey Bishop Show, which ran from 1961-65. He was also a frequent guest, and guest host, for such TV talk show kings as Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, and briefly had his own talk show in the late 60s. Bishop made fewer and fewer appearances throughout the 70s, occasionally popping up on a variety of television shows ranging from Match Game to Murder, She Wrote, and in a few films, the last two being Betsy's Wedding (1990) and Mad Dog Time (1996). Bishop is survived by his son, Larry.

Following their successful collaboration in Kill Bill-Vol. 2, Quentin Tarantino is set to team again with Larry Bishop, the actor who played the foul-mouthed owner of a strip club in the hit movie. Tarantino and Bishop will produce Hell Ride, a motorcycle movie that Bishop is writing and will direct and star in. Sources say Tarantino might star in the movie as well. Michael Madsen, who also starred in Bill, is attached to star in what is being described as a spaghetti biker film. The story deals with the characters Pistolero (Bishop), the Gent (Madsen) and Comanche (Tarantino) and the deadly unfinished business between them. As befitting the genre, the budget would be low, and the movie would shoot in August or September. It is unclear whether Tarantino would produce under his A Band Apart productions shingle or his Rolling Thunder Pictures. Bishop starred in several biker movies in the late '60s and early '70s, including The Savage Seven, Chrome and Hot Leather and Angel Unchained. He also wrote, directed, co-produced and starred in 1996's Mad Dog Time, whose cast included Diane Lane, Gabriel Byrne and Burt Reynolds. He is repped by the Coppage Co. Tarantino is repped by WMA, while Madsen by Writers and Artists Group International.