Real-life inspired dramas Spotlight and Big Short won the best original and adapted screenplay Oscars at the 88th Academy Awards here.
The Tom McCarthy-directed drama, about Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of child sex abuse by Catholic priests, won Josh Singer and McCarthy trophies in the original screenplay category.
The film, featuring a stellar ensemble cast of Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, John Slattery, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci, and Billy Crudup, revolves around the investigative team of Boston Globe reporters who relentlessly pursue the story even as they get constantly stalled by those in power.
Big Short, a biographical drama, is based on the non-fiction 2010 book of the same name by Michael Lewis about the financial crisis of 2007-2008 that was triggered by the build-up of the housing market and the credit bubble.
Monthly Archive: February 2016
Hollywood Flashback: When Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston Launched Plan B Entertainment
Before securing a best picture Oscar (2013’s ’12 Years a Slave’), the production company — created by the stars and Brad Grey in 2001 — endured a change of studio heads and the couple’s very public divorce.
This story first appeared in a special awards season issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Plan B Entertainment might win its second best picture Oscar in three years with The Big Short (after 2013’s 12 Years a Slave), but there was a time when things were not looking so golden for the production company. The name has its roots in a shingle started by Bruce Berman at Warner Bros. after he stepped down as the studio’s worldwide production head in 1996. Eighteen months later, Berman left to head Village Roadshow, and the company went dormant. In 2001, he passed the name on to Brad Grey for a production company Grey was creating at Warners with Brad Pitt and Pitt’s then-wife, Jennifer Aniston.
Pitt Developing Medical Drama ‘He Wanted the Moon’ With Tony Kushner
Brad Pitt’s Plan B and Cross Creek Pictures are teaming with writer Tony Kushner to develop medical research drama “He Wanted the Moon.”
The project is a co-production with Cross Creek’s Brian Oliver and Tyler Thompson producing with Plan B. The companies have acquired movie rights to the memoir, written by Dr. Perry Baird’s daughter Mimi and Eve Claxton, titled “He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter’s Quest to Know Him.”
Baird was a rising medical star in the late ’20s and ’30s who researched the biochemical root of manic depression, just as he began to suffer from it himself. By the time the results of his groundbreaking experiments were published, he had been institutionalized multiple times and he had become estranged from his family. He later received a lobotomy and died from a seizure.
Dede Gardner And Jeremy Kleiner: “’The Big Short’ Isn’t A Film For Any One Particular Political Orientation”
Plan B co-presidents Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner are producers operating at the highest level, finding themselves and their films in the awards conversation repeatedly and closing major deals on a regular basis. They won Best Picture for 12 Years A Slave just three years ago, and will be hoping to capitalize on their PGA triumph with The Big Short this year when the AMPAS envelopes get opened on Feb 28. The Big Short has been hailed not only for its humor but for its pressing sociopolitical relevance. Gardner and Kleiner discuss the outcome of the film’s successfully “bipartisan” screening before Congress, the great effects on the world of socially conscious films, and some of the best advice they’ve taken from fellow Plan B producer Brad Pitt.
Read more. Very interesting interview.
BP Gallery Update
• x014 Candids – San Servolo, Italy (04/03/10).
• x004 Candids – Venice, Italy (04/13/10).
• x005 In the Land of Blood and Honey – New York City, NY (12/05/11).
• x085 Venice, Italy (03/12/10).
• x010 Venice, Italy (03/04/10).
• x010 Venice, Italy (03/08/10).
Thanks Vaska.
PS. Still working on the BP Gallery backstage.
