Quentin Blake reveals he has not received a penny in royalties from Steven Spielberg blockbuster
The BFG, as played by Mark Rylance in last year's animated blockbusterCREDIT: DISNEY FILM
With his wispy grey hair, shaggy sideburns, big nose and brown waistcoat, the image of Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant is as instantly recognisable to millions as his giant peach, child-catching Twits and a certain top-hatted confectionery magnate
The difficult reconciliation of the memory of World War II with mass tourism in the Netherlands
Residents of the Dutch estate portrayed in the TV series ‘Band of Brothers,’ produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, will install a fence and charge for photos to stem the flow of tourists
ISABEL FERRER
THE HUGUE, JUNE 28, 2023
In uniform, with his helmet resting on his side and a slight smile on his face. This is how U.S. Major Richard Dick Winters posed in 1944 under the archway at the entrance to an estate in the east of the Netherlands. The complex is called Schoonderlogt and is located in the village of Elst, in the Betuwe region. The Allied troops called the area The Island and the fighting there lasted 198 days during World War II. Winters and his men, members of Easy Company, transcended the realm of military memory thanks to a television series released in 2001: Band of Brothers (HBO), co-produced by filmmaker Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks. British actor Damian Lewis plays Winters, and the image of him, posing in the same place as the U.S. officer, has become so famous over time that the owners of the property are going to install a fence and charge for photos to stem the flow of tourists.
Steven Spielberg to Produce ‘Voyeur’s Motel,’ Sam Mendes Directing
Dave McNary April 14 2016
Steven Spielberg is producing a movie version of Gay Talese’s upcoming novel “The Voyeur’s Motel” for DreamWorks with Sam Mendes directing.
Mendes will produce through his Neal Street Productions company. Mendes, who directed the James Bond movies “Skyfall” and “Spectre,” has directed a trio of titles for DreamWorks — his debut on “American Beauty,” “The Road to Perdition” and “Revolutionary Road.”
DreamWorks won an auction for the rights to Talese’s novel. CAA brokered the auction.
The story centers on Colorado resident Gerald Foos, who opened a hotel so he could watch guests having sex. Foos had reached out to Talese in 1980 with the following note:
“Dear Mr. Talese: Since learning of your long awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America, which will be included in your soon to be published book, ‘Thy Neighbor’s Wife,’ I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.”
An excerpt of “The Voyeur’s Motel” ran in the April 11 issue of the New Yorker. The novel will be published July 12 by Grove Press.
CAA brokered the deal on behalf of Mendes and Talese. Mendes is also represented by attorney Melanie Cook of Ziffren Brittenham. Talese is represented for publishing by Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit.
The news was first reported by Deadline Hollywood.
Continuing our countdown of the best movies released in the US this year, we salute Steven Spielberg’s ode to the real-life cold war lawyer who defended a Soviet spy
Peter Bradshaw Monday 14 December 2015 12.00 GMT
Steven Spielberg’s Cold War spy-swap drama Bridge of Spies is a movie of glorious craftsmanship, human sympathy and flair. It’s a consciously old-fashioned piece of Hollywood storytelling conceived in something like the heartfelt, ingenuous style of Frank Capra. Where once we had Mr Smith Goes To Washington — here we have Mr Hanks Goes To West Berlin.
The movie is based on a real-life story: in 1962, America planned to recover Gary Powers, the U2 spy-plane pilot captured by the Soviets, by handing over their own incarcerated Russian spy Rudolf Abel, an agonisingly tense deal that could go wrong at any time. The screenplay is co-credited to British dramatist Matt Charmian and to Joel and Ethan Coen, who have presumably created some of the movie’s more crepuscular and black-comic scenes. (Where there’s a hit there’s a writ they say, and this movie is now subject to legal action from the British author Giles Whittell, who also wrote non-fiction a book about these events.)
The deal was brokered by the American lawyer Thomas B Donovan, played by Tom Hanks, who had earlier accepted the poisoned chalice of representing Abel in court when this Soviet spy was caught and convicted. Abel is played by Mark Rylance, whose distinctive charisma and light, musical voice is just right for making this character opaque and unreadable: not a bad guy, though certainly not a good guy in any accepted sense. (Hanks has the dibs on that.) He is certainly an elegant, eccentric foil to the plainspeaking candour of Hanks’s American lawyer. Repeatedly, Donovan will ask Abel in his prison cell: “Aren’t you worried?” and Abel will deadpan: “Would it help?”
Donovan: “Aren’t you worried?” Abel: “Would it help?
Spielberg immerses the audience in an entire, created world of 60s Berlin and 60s New York, and his movie hits its confident stride right away. The “chase” sequence at the very beginning, in which Abel is pursued through the subway system, is a veritable masterclass in film-making — supremely confident and yet understated.
What is so striking about this kind of story is that, rightly or wrongly, I think audiences here will be used to the John Le Carre way of thinking about it — the drab, exhausted and cynical world of moral equivalence and the balance of power: each side believes its ideology is superior, of course, but appreciates how the nuclear balance and balance of ideological belief is keeping a kind of peace. Somehow, Spielberg conjures from this world something very different from Le Carre: he uncovers old-fashioned, uncomplicated decency and moral courage in this situation and even a kind of covert diplomatic entrepreneurialism. The movie and Hanks’s performance itself is a richly satisfying mix: just the right amount of hokum — homely, wily and kindly. It’s the work of a master.
