Meet J. Michael Straczynski. 54-years-old. Veteran writer of everything from “Babylon 5” to that “He-Man” cartoon in the 80s (I know, I got excited when I saw that on his resume too.) And overnight success story?
Admittedly it’s more than a little odd for publications like Variety to call Straczynski -- a scribe with an IMDB listing as long as they come -- as one of their ten screenwriters to watch. But that’s just what his screenplay for the new Clint Eastwood film, “Changeling,” has provoked.
“It’s proof that the Hollywood fairytale still exists,” Straczynski told MTV News this week. And listening to him tell the story of how the film came to be makes it hard to argue. “Changeling,” tells the true story of Christine Collins, a single mother in Los Angeles in the 1920s who had her abducted child returned to her by the LAPD only to find that it was not her son at all. Read more...
Don't ask me why I was the lucky guy to get this opportunity, but last week I had the exceedingly rare (and thus far only) opportunity to talk to Clint Eastwood and Angelina Jolie together on camera (check out the article here).
"Changeling" is the film they sat down to chat about and the rumblings you've heard since Cannes are true -- Jolie is a sure bet for an Oscar nomination for this one. The disturbing (and true) tale comes out in limited released on October 24th but here are Clint and Angelina talking it up today.
Check out the full Eastwood/Jolie Rough Cut here.
On a cold day last December, an actor playing a part against Angelina Jolie leaned over and kissed her. The only trouble was, it wasn't in the script.
"I try to be selective with my improvising," said Jason Butler Harner, who is her co-star in Clint Eastwood's upcoming "Changeling." So he checked with the director first. "Clint approved," he said. "He could see it happening and he said, 'Do it and we'll see what happens.'"
Jolie was supposed to be pushing Harner against a wall. It was the movie's climatic scene, and her character, Christine Collins, was supposed to be confronting his character, Gordon Stewart Northcott, and asking him, "Did you kill my son?" (The film is based on a true story; in the 1920s, Collins' son was abducted, and another boy was "returned" to her instead. When she insisted that the second boy was not her son, she was deemed hysterical, when actually it was a case of LAPD corruption). Read more...
Angelina Jolie may be on the verge of taking a year off from film, but before that happens she is positively giddy about one more upcoming role, calling her next shoot "an amazing chance to work with an amazing man, a hero of mine."
"I'm looking forward to a film I get to do with Clint Eastwood. It's so cool. And it's a great script," the Oscar winner told MTV News on the eve of the release of her latest drama, "A Mighty Heart."
The film she's referring to is the forthcoming "The Changeling", a drama she describes as "a real story of a child who was kidnapped in 1928...and [the] cover-up by the LAPD." Earlier this year Variety reported that Jolie would play "a woman whose son is abducted but retrieved; she suspects, however, that the returned child is not her kid." Read more...
