• x61 Los Angeles, CA (07/02/09) thanks Carole!
SimplyBrad.com
Basterds @ Ultimate Fighting Championship
The Weinstein Co. is stepping into the ring.
The mini-major is making an unconventional marketing move for its upcoming period pic “Inglourious Basterds,” partnering with the Ultimate Fighting Championship to promote the film.
The Quentin Tarantino movie will be featured at the mixed-martial-arts organization’s UFC 100, a large-scale pay-per-view event set for Saturday in Las Vegas. “Basterds” will get an animated billboard and placement inside the fighting ring, aka the “octagon,” and a trailer will be shown to about 11,000 fans in attendance at Mandalay Bay.
The move marks an interesting approach for TWC in seeking young males for “Basterds.” The pic, set for an Aug. 21 domestic release, is set in Nazi-occupied France and features long stretches in non-English languages.
But TWC hopes to break the film out of the art house by highlighting its action sequences and star Brad Pitt. UFC, with its mainstream fan base, is seen as one of several keys to reaching a wider audience.
Eli Roth Wants To Know: How Does Brad Pitt Go To The Bathroom?
If you had a few hours alone with the most famous actor in the world, what would you ask him? That was the thought process driving director/actor Eli Roth when he appeared alongside Brad Pitt in the upcoming Quentin Tarantino flick, “Inglourious Basterds.” Naturally, Roth asked something we all might want to know: how does the dude go to the bathroom?
“I was wondering: ‘You’re at a baseball game and you have to take a p-ss,” Roth said with a laugh, remembering his query on the set of “Inglourious Basterds.” “What do you do?”’
Credit Mr. Angelina Jolie with an open-book answer, as Pitt told Roth that it happens to him all the time. “It’s a real problem,” Roth recalled Pitt’s response. “(He told me) ‘you go into a bathroom at Dodger Stadium, and everyone is looking at you. It’s kind of weird… you have to wait until the Dodgers are up, and it thins out – and then you find an empty stall.’
Brad’s bathroom behavior didn’t discourage Roth from enjoying his experience on the Tarantino set, or with the famous movie star leading the cast. Pitt, Roth and the rest of the ensemble bonded over their work on the bloody WWII epic about a group of Jewish-American soldiers determined to take down the Nazis.
“Brad Pitt is amazing,” Roth said of his experience appearing opposite Pitt, Mike Myers, B.J. Novak and others. “He was the coolest.”
Read more. Thanks Intothegrinder.
Mag Alert
In the newest (August) issue of Empire magazine there is an official interview with Brad. It features Brad as Lt. Also Raine on the cover. Thanks Margaret.
Pascal talks more Moneyball
It’s never an easy decision when a studio head has to pull the plug on a big movie, as Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal did last week when she shut down “Moneyball,” a $58 million Steven Soderbergh film that was set to star Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the maverick general manager of the Oakland Athletics who almost single-handedly reinvented the way baseball scouts and develops young talent.
The movie, based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, wasn’t just in preproduction — it was five days away from filming when Soderbergh turned in a new version of the script that Pascal and her Sony team found unacceptable. The decision was so abrupt that the film’s producer, Michael DeLuca, got the call about it while on his honeymoon in Paris. As a courtesy to the stars, Pascal gave them an opportunity to try and set the film up elsewhere, but no other studio has shown any interest. So the movie remains at Sony, but will it ever get made?
Although stories about the film’s abrupt demise have appeared everywhere — with Variety getting the original scoop — Pascal hasn’t talked about the decision until now. To hear her tell it, Soderbergh delivered a script that was inventive but a radical departure from the film Sony thought he was going to make. It was, put simply, more of a re-creation than a feature film.
“I’ve wanted to work with Steven forever because he’s simply a great filmmaker,” Pascal said last week. “But the draft he turned in wasn’t at all what we’d signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic re-enactment of events with real people playing themselves. I’d still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did.”
