In Die Hard, Holly Gennaro asks Hans Gruber, “What’s going on?”, only to receive the less-than-clear response, “The child is about to touch the stove.” Poetic thieves aside, Reese Witherspoon has a ...

The question I get asked most is how to raise the money needed to make a film. My stock answer usually starts with asking if they are looking for funding or financing. Funding is money given because ...

I measured every second of sound in 1,423 films, including 478 sound Oscar nominees, to test an old Hollywood joke.

One of the biggest forces in the film industry (beyond familial nepotism) is your professional network. The more people you have backing you and your projects, the better your outcomes are likely to ...

De Luca and Abdy, we hear, ran Digger through their analytical comps system. The combo of Cruise and Iñárritu justified a $125M production greenligiht. Three weeks before Digger opened, De Luca told ...

Last night I had the absolute pleasure of watching American Graffiti (1973) at the ActOne Cinema in Acton, and then listening to Mark Kermode quiz Walter Murch about how he built its sound. Murch ...

In early 1986, Frank Oz held preview screenings of Little Shop of Horrors in San Jose. He stayed faithful to the musical it was based on, so the movie climaxed with both Seymour and Audrey dying, the ...

Despite the massive changes in production, exhibition, and home entertainment over the past twenty years, it’s always surprising to me how similar the sales side of the film business has remained. The ...

If you’re an avid reader of culture journalists, then it seems as though there is always some country or other “taking over Hollywood”. In the 2000s it was the Australians. In the 2010s it was the ...

I saw Spider-Man: Far From Necessary over the weekend and, like everyone else in the cinema, I sat through the entire end crawl to watch the ‘post-credits scene’ that has become so ubiquitous among ...

Every year, tens of thousands of screenwriters pay to enter contests. A major selling point for them is that winning (or placing highly) will mean that the right people will finally read your script.

“We’re moments away from uploading a script and making movies!” (This is usually followed by the person trying to get me to look at a demo of their “ground-breaking” vibe-coded AI-to-storyboard ...