Film Industry

There's nothing a legislative body likes more than celebrities, particularly hometown stars who step forward to state their affiliation with their states. So lawmakers, who were already wowed once by Wayne Newton this year, went fairly gaga over Oscar-winning actress Sissy Spacek, who visited the Capitol today along with her husband, production designer Jack Frost, to push new incentives for filmmaking in Virginia. She lives outside Charlottesville. Spacek attended a mid-morning press conference with Lt. Gov....

VETO THREAT: France is threatening to veto any free-trade deal between the European Union and the U.S. that includes the film, radio or TV industries. ARTISTIC LISCENSE: The audiovisual sectors are traditionally excluded from global free-trade agreements under what is known as the "cultural exception," which allows governments to subsidize and protect them. In general, free-trade agreements limit or ban such support. STICKING POINT: Ireland, which holds the EU's rotating...

NEW DELHI — The lights dimmed, and the audience fell silent as a montage of movie scenes showed women dancing in skimpy clothing or being verbally abused, slapped, leered at, pawed, tied and raped. The scenes had been cut out of movies, deemed inappropriate by government censors. But they were screened for the first time this weekend in New Delhi during a three-day workshop called "Cut-Uncut," which was part of a festival celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema. India has the world's largest...

NEW DELHI — The lights dimmed, and the audience fell silent as a montage of movie scenes showed women dancing in skimpy clothing or being verbally abused, slapped, leered at, pawed, tied and raped. The scenes had been cut out of movies, deemed inappropriate by government censors. But they were screened for the first time this weekend in New Delhi during a three-day workshop called "Cut-Uncut," which was part of a festival celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema. India has the world's largest...

MUMBAI -- With a résumé listing his acting gigs in rural folk theater and a handful of slightly out-of-focus head shots, Birendra Paswan arrived in this crowded city from his rural village in Bihar, one of India's poorest states, and asked, "Where's Bollywood?" Paswan, 33, is a Dalit, a member of India's most ostracized caste. Dalits are often cobblers, street sweepers and toilet cleaners, but they are rarely actors in the world's largest film industry. Still, as he stood that day beneath towering billboards...

John Latenser doesn't want to lose his dome. The Bethesda-based location scout was standing last week on one of Hollywood's favorite spots in the District, a sliver of pavement at the edge of the reflecting pool with the U.S. Capitol looming just so over his shoulder — as it has loomed over Sean Penn, Aaron Eckhart and various Transformer robots . "This is one of the great money shots in D.C.," says Latenser, who was here scouting angles...

Peter Stray remembers a scary Washington audition when he was trying out for a Shakespeare play. Stray, 32, grew up in Wales and trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London before marrying an American and moving here. He had prepped for the audition using his native British intonations, but the director wanted an American accent. Gulp. "Fear flashed through my head that I'm going to sound like Kermit the Frog," Stray recalls. "I ended up doing a sub-Kelsey Grammer...

"It is always a shock to people at studios that women do go see movies," Nora Ephron said this spring. Ephron, who passed away Tuesday at 71, and whose films included the beloved "Sleepless in Seattle" and "When Harry Met Sally," knew a thing or two about making movies that women wanted to see. She also knew how hard it was to get them on the screen. She was speaking at a screening of "This Is My Life," the first film she directed, and mentioned that she hoped the huge success of "Bridesmaids,"...

"Forrest Gump," the multiple-Oscar winning 1994 film starring Tom Hanks as an American innocent navigating the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, was named to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry on Wednesday, along with 24 other films deemed worthy of preservation at the library's conservation facility in Culpeper, Va. This year's list spans more than 80 years, with " Forrest Gump " being the most recent title and...

Jasper Fforde is the author of 12 genre-bending fantasy novels, including the bestselling Thursday Next series. The latest entry, "The Woman Who Died a Lot," is out this week. Fforde spoke by phone from his home in Wales, just before a month-long U.S. book tour. Your new novel opens with Detective Thursday, now in her 50s, recovering from a car accident and unable to slug it out with the bad guys the way she used to. That seems grimly realistic for a fanciful character who can enter classic novels and...

HONG KONG The surprise hit in Chinese theaters last year was a low-budget, wacky road-trip comedy that even beat out global blockbuster "Avatar" to become the country's highest-grossing film ever. But "Lost in Thailand" found just a paltry $57,000 during its U.S. theatrical release. The film that earned $200 million in China joins other homegrown hits that have flopped internationally, and is the latest sign that while the country has become a box-office superpower, it faces a harder task fulfilling its leaders' hopes that...

Jasper Fforde is the author of 12 genre-bending fantasy novels, including the bestselling Thursday Next series. The latest entry, "The Woman Who Died a Lot," is out this week. Fforde spoke by phone from his home in Wales, just before a month-long U.S. book tour. Your new novel opens with Detective Thursday, now in her 50s, recovering from a car accident and unable to slug it out with the bad guys the way she used to. That seems grimly realistic for a fanciful character who can enter classic novels and...

"It is always a shock to people at studios that women do go see movies," Nora Ephron said this spring. Ephron, who passed away Tuesday at 71, and whose films included the beloved "Sleepless in Seattle" and "When Harry Met Sally," knew a thing or two about making movies that women wanted to see. She also knew how hard it was to get them on the screen. She was speaking at a screening of "This Is My Life," the first film she directed, and mentioned that she hoped the huge success of "Bridesmaids," ...

PG Mirror Mirror. Julia Roberts has fun playing an evil Queen in this often humorous, yet rather misshapen re-imagining of the classic Brothers Grimm tale "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. " The laughs come pretty far apart, yet kids 8 and older will probably like the tongue-in-cheek approach and appreciate the more active role this Snow White (Lily Collins) takes in her own fate.  It is the nasty Queen herself who narrates the tale, complete with sarcastic asides, and who communes through...

Buoyed by a nostalgic notion that a silent movie is totally where it's at, Sunday night's 84th annual Academy Awards telecast on ABC turned into a dull exercise in the ol' Hollywood self-salute, a sentimental journey, as if the industry was performing CPR on a business model that is vanishing before everyone's eyes. Billy Crystal, hosting his ninth Oscar show (his first was in 1990, his most recent was in 2004), seemed to be overseeing a cruise ship dinner show designed to appeal to the over-50 travel club.

John Latenser doesn't want to lose his dome. The Bethesda-based location scout was standing last week on one of Hollywood's favorite spots in the District, a sliver of pavement at the edge of the reflecting pool with the U.S. Capitol looming just so over his shoulder — as it has loomed over Sean Penn, Aaron Eckhart and various Transformer robots . "This is one of the great money shots in D.C.," says Latenser, who was here scouting angles...

STARDUST By Joseph Kanon Atria. 516 pp. $27.99 WP BOOKSTORE In "Stardust," Joseph Kanon does a noir take on a noir time and place: Hollywood in the late '40s. There's an image-within-an-image effect here that evokes the hall-of-mirrors shootout in " The Lady From Shanghai . " The threat of TV, of anti-communist witch hunts and of legislation that will divorce the studios from their coffer-filling theaters have Tinseltown on edge. So frightened, treacherous people make films about frightened, treacherous people.

An incomplete copy of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" was leaked onto the Internet a month before the movie's scheduled release. The stolen copy was posted Tuesday night, Twentieth Century Fox studio said in an e-mailed statement. The film was removed after Fox contacted legal authorities, the studio said, without identifying the Web site. The theft highlights the difficulty Hollywood studios face as online distribution of movies and shows becomes easier. Piracy cost the film industry, including studios, theaters...