iPad NUMBER FOUR
iPads Helped Direct I Am Number Four
From the sounds of director DJ Caruso’s remarks on the iPad, the tablet did everything on the set of upcoming sci-fi flick I Am Number Four but order coffee and belittle the extras.
He gushes:
“Well I think people who are making movies now, I can’t imagine they’re not doing it [using the iPad] because, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve got every previz thing on there, I have every storyboard on there, I have every script and every script note,” he said. “I make my shot list on there and from that shot list I just send it… it’s become an amazing tool and I never would have thought it would have kicked in that fast. In fact, I talked to Steven, because I was sending him something from my iPad and he sent something back from his iPad and I thought, ‘Oh you got one!’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ and I told him all these things I was using and he was like, ‘Which apps do you have?’ so here you are sending back which apps you have to Steven Spielberg. everyone’s starting to use it because it really is an amazing tool.”
Dave Duerson Gone
Bears’ Duerson shot himself; brain to be studied
By Dan Pompei and Duaa Eldeib
Former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest, a source with knowledge of the situation told the Tribune.
His death has been ruled a suicide, but the Miami-Dade police department has yet to make the information public.
“He had informed (his family) at some point that he wanted his brain to be studied so people could learn more about the effect of brain trauma and so kids could play the game more safely in the future,” Chris Nowinski said.
The Bears selected Duerson out of Notre Dame in the third round of the 1983 draft. He became a starter in 1985 and played in the first of four consecutive Pro Bowls that season. In 1987, he was named the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year. He also was one of the Bears’ NFLPA representatives and was a leader through the 1987 strike.
DIVE f/x Powers #4 Lumens
DIVE Produces 105 for I Am Number Four
February 19, 2011 | Levent OZLER
DIVE produced 105 visual effects shots in the highly anticipated DreamWorks release “I Am Number Four.” DIVE worked with Visual Effects Supervisor Greg McMurray to enhance the main character’s otherworldly powers showcased in the film. One of DIVE’s challenges was in creating a technique to demonstrate the power of “Lumen” and how it transfers to the tools the main character touches.
DIVE established Lumen’s blue glow by combining an enhanced and lengthened motion blur with the original gleam from an LED crystal embedded in a sword. The team then manually tracked both the tip and bottom of this crystal in each shot due to the speed of the blades and the lighting in the shots.
“We created a tool to give us the streaks and enhanced motion blur coming off of the crystal during the fast fighting,” said DIVE Sequence Lead Jeremy Fernsler. “We then controlled the length and fade of the streak. This tool also made it easier to tweak the motion curve from the track and allowed us to make the streaks follow the flow of the sword strikes during the battle. A final color correct and glow pass tied the enhancements together.”
“I Am Number Four” also highlights DIVE’s work in Paint. While camera projections were used to aid the larger plate restoration areas, some trickier techniques were employed when Number Four dives from a cliff over a waterfall. In this scene, the actor’s wires were both behind thin strands of hair and in front of a pool of rippling water making for a tricky paint fix.
I AM NUMBER FOUR Stunt Featurette
Lynda Benglis Oozing
Artful Commentary, Oozing From the Walls
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
The New Museum has become a busy place this year, and it is not yet even March. In January it opened a popular tribute to the market-hardy paintings of George Condo. Now it is offering a startlingly excellent resurrection of the prescient Post-Minimalist renegade Lynda Benglis and her gaudy, multidexterous and often gender-bending segues among Process, Performance and Body Art.
Ms. Benglis is something of a mythic character, as many female artists of the 1960s and early ’70s are by now. Working in pigmented latex, beeswax or polyurethane foam and even glitter, she made daring, often ephemeral or fragile works that have plenty of historical weight but little market presence.
Permanence seems to have been the last thing on her mind, at least in the early years. Many pieces were temporary installations that did not survive; others had the kind of willful fragility that makes collectors nervous. One of her most famous works is nothing but a brilliantly orchestrated magazine ad: a performance-slash-photograph that ran in the November 1974 issue of Artforum for which she posed, taut and well-oiled, wearing only a pair of rhinestone-studded cat-eye sunglasses and wielding a dildo.
Roasted Pork and Brussel Sprouts
Secret Weapon Number Six
The Secret Weapon of ‘I Am Number Four’
By Michelle Kung
- Getty
Alex Pettyfer and Diana Agron may ostensibly be the leads of “I Am Number Four,” but it’s Aussie actress Teresa Palmer that has early viewers buzzing with her small, but critical role as a fearless, Ducati-riding alien known as Number Six.
Based on the YA novel by Pittacus Lore — better known as the pseudonym of authors James Frey and Jobie Hughes — “Number Four” is the first film project from Frey’s Full Fathom Five venture and centers about the adventures of Number Four (Pettyfer), one of nine aliens — with latent superpowers, naturally — sent to earth to escape the wrath of the evil Mogadorian race.
Even though the film features two female characters, Palmer says she was attracted to Number Six because she was “dark and edgy and mysterious, and she’s as intimidating as she is mysterious.” Palmer, who currently lives in LA but frequently returns home to her native Adelaide, Australia, was less enamored of her strict training schedule for the film.
ICH BIN NUMMER VIER
Rowley Fall 2011
Cynthia Rowley Keeps it Classy With Longer Skirts and Lush Fabrics
Sunday, February 13, 2011, by Fawnia Soo Hoo
In between planning art collaborations, making Band-Aids and Pampers fun and launching a line of bridesmaid dresses, we wonder how Cynthia Rowley finds the time to work on her own signature collections, but she pulls it off every single time. Especially on Friday when she showed her Fall 2011 collection in the Fashion Week tents.
The eclectic mix of bold names in the audience was definitely representative of Cynthia Rowley’s many pursuits. We spotted steadfast supporter and The Good Wifestar Alan Cumming, a dishy Nigel Barker, actress Julia Stiles, newly-engagedLauren Bush and James Frey (yes, that James Frey).
STEED LORD’s 123 If You Want Me
From The Days Of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys
The Business Behind Young Adult Novels
Many of us were SHOCKED this week to learn that Vampire Diaries author L. J. Smith has been fired from writing forthcoming books in her popular series. How can an author possibly be fired from writing her own books? Well, it turns out that Alloy Entertainment, a book packager, actually owns the rights to the Vampire Diaries as well as a few other of the hottest franchises in Young Adult literature like Gossip Girl, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and Pretty Little Liars.
So what do Alloy and other book packagers do? In a nutshell: they develop ideas, hire writers, and sell the finished products to publishers. A 2009 article in The New Yorker, “The Gossip Mill,” outlined the process at Alloy, whose target audience is young women and girls. They have weekly meetings where ideas are pitched, often reworking successful adult stories for younger audiences (examples cited in the article: a reverse of the movie Taken where a teenage girl has to rescue her kidnapped parents and a suggestion for “Shaun of the Dead for tweens.”). If they decide to go forward with a pitch, an editor will flesh out the idea before asking a writer to create a sample chapter. If they like the writer’s work, s/he will be put on contract to write the first act of the book, although plotting is a collaboration between the writer and editors at Alloy. The first act and a mockup of a potential book cover are then pitched to publishers. The process is described as being similar to the way a TV show is developed and written.
It’s not a new practice; packaging books for teens goes back to the days of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and even those 80s staples, the Sweet Valley High books (fun fact: Gossip Girl author Cecily von Ziegesar wrote some of the SVH books). More recently, James Frey and his so-called “fiction factory,” Full Fathom Five, have made headlines as the creators of the YA book I Am Number Four. The movie based on the book was produced by Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay, and will be in theaters next week.
SMALL WORLD BOOKS in Venice
Bookstore of the week: Small World Books in Venice
Mary Goodfader moved her bookstore to the Venice Boardwalk in 1976 after seven years in Marina del Rey. When she and her husband Robert found the space that now holds Small World Books and the Sidewalk Cafe, the building was empty, she says, covered with graffiti like “stop bombing in Cambodia.” They bought the building and divided responsibilities: She ran the bookstore and Robert ran the cafe along the boardwalk, which faces the sea. The restaurant is “pretty much the reason the bookstore can exist,” Goodfader says. “As long as people want to buy hamburgers, I’ll keep it going.”
Venice Beach is home to some famous characters, apart from those available on the postcards for sale. Those who’ve stopped in at the store include actors John Cleese and Paul Giamatti, filmmaker Tony Bill, musician Andy Summers and artists Ed Ruscha and Robert Graham. Writer James Frey was “a great friend of the store,” says Mary Goodfader. “We liked him a lot.” He did two signings there; these days, the store rarely hosts book signings.
SOY EL NUMERO CUATRO
Agron and Palmer At The IMN4 Premiere
Dianna Agron, Alex Pettyfer Light Up ‘I Am Number Four’ Red Carpet
Posted 2/10/11 11:56 am ET by Amy Wilkinson in Fashion & Style
Aliens landed in L.A. last night. But don’t worry—they were the peace-loving kind. The stars of “I Am Number Four,” including Alex Pettyfer, Dianna Agron and Teresa Palmer, walked the red carpet at the Westwood Village Theater for the premiere of their extra-terrestrial thriller. The stars’ fashions were undeniably out of this world—most in a good way, but some…not so much.
“I got a jlowbob once on a motorcycle.”
The Imaginary Author Photo
James Frey & the Imaginary Author Photo
How do you photograph an imaginary author?
Novelist James Frey and Jobie Hughes co-wrote I Am Number Four under the pseudonym of “Pittacus Lore.” The author photo for the imaginary author of the YA book is pictured above (via Howard Huang)–click to enlarge. What do you think of Frey’s first offering from his fiction factory?
Here’s more from the official site: “I am Pittacus Lore. I am from the Planet Lorien, three hundred million miles away. I am one of ten Elders who lived on our planet. I am ten thousand years old.
Mapplethorpe To Getty and LACMA
Los Angeles to become home to Robert Mapplethorpe work and archive [Updated]
As of this summer, Los Angeles will become the leading destination for anyone interested in artist Robert Mapplethorpe, thanks to a joint acquisition just finalized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust.
The acquisition includes more than 2,000 works by the artist, “including a print of virtually every photograph he editioned in silver gelatin,” according to the museums. Silver gelatin is the process by which he made his most widely known work, black and white photographs.
It also includes the Mapplethorpe archive, featuring one-of-a-kind silver gelatin prints, thousands of Polaroid studies for his work, personal correspondence to intimates such as Patti Smith, and documentation of the 1990 obscenity trial in Cincinnati that made Mapplethorpe a central figure in that decade’s culture wars.
Richland, Washington School Board Bans James Frey’s Book (The Reich Would Be Proud)
Richland School Board to hear appeal on book
BY JACQUES VON LUNEN, HERALD STAFF WRITER Published: 02/02/11
RICHLAND — A good novel can teach a lot about life. But how much profanity or other objectionable content should be in novels used in school?
That’s the question the Richland School Board will be asked to consider tonight when a West Richland parent asks to have Snow Falling on Cedars by Washington writer David Guterson removed from the list of books that could be used in an Advanced Placement English language and composition class at Hanford High School.
The committee seemed to be in agreement on its first book from the long list Tuesday. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey got little support from those who seemed to be the least willing to ban a book from school.
Free Frank Tanori Gonzalez
Ariz. man accused of putting porn in TV broadcast
TUCSON, Ariz. — An Arizona man has been arrested on charges that he used a computer to interrupt a local telecast of the 2009 Super Bowl with a 37-second pornography clip.
The FBI and Marana police took Frank Tanori Gonzalez into custody Friday on suspicion of fraud and computer tampering.
Authorities say someone cut into the Comcast cable broadcast of the game between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers that went to viewers in the Tucson area.
Idle Doodles by Famous Authors
Jorge Luis Borges’ self-portrait, drawn after he had gone blind.
[ click to see all the Famous Author Doodles at FlavorWire.com ]
“Whatever else you can say about Frey… writing matters to him in a ferocious, palpable way.”
Is James Frey the Most Important Writer in America?
By Stephen Marche [more from this author]
Antonio Zazueta Olmos
The author of A Million Little Pieces and other works of fiction.
Today is an uplifting, degrading, and all-around confusing time to be a writer in America. Even as creative-writing departments proliferate like bedbugs and each year brings a fresh (and deserving) claimant to the title of Great American Novel (The Emperor’s Children, Netherland, Freedom, all great books), content farms are herding the young and determined literati into anonymous sweatshops run by all-seeing, unforgiving masters of metrics. More people want to be writers even as continual technological breakthroughs — Blogspot, Twitter, and tablets of every shape and size — make the future of writing less solid and predictable. The old orders are falling and the new ones have not yet emerged, and worst of all, nobody, it seems, knows how to write about sex anymore. We are in a moment of literary in-betweenness, and into this world of upheaval, to everybody’s surprise, has stepped James Frey, a refugee from the great decade of American fraud, pointing the way up and out like a deranged false prophet. The man has plans.
John Bramley/DreamWorks
I Am Number Four, a story about a good-looking teenage alien and his struggle to survive.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since Oprah humiliated Frey on national television. And though he proceeded (sensibly) to make himself scarce for a while, you are going to be reading a lot about him this year, even if you’re not really meaning to. His upcoming novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, follows a man who may or may not be Christ through twenty-first-century Manhattan, and the film version of the best-selling book I Am Number Four will be released in February. The latter is the first fruit of Frey’s publishing venture, Full Fathom Five, the setup of which has caused a minor scandal. Frey finds young writers to “coproduce” commercial young-adult fiction: They write it, he controls it, they can tell their friends and parents that they’ve written a book, and he takes up to 70 percent of the royalties. Frey, at least according to some, trolls the M.F.A. programs in New York rather the way pimps in movies troll Penn Station for farmers’ daughters, but I hesitate to judge his plan. The truth is that anyone who spends $40,000 a year to be taught how to write by writers who cannot make a living by writing, or who imagines that fairness and common sense have anything to do with the publishing industry, could probably use a lesson in how life really works.
(Hemingway) Archivo Castillo Puche/EFE/Corbis; (Mailer) Interfoto/Alamy
Hemingway and Mailer are among Frey’s idols.
Which leads me to the only thing I really like about Frey: his arrogance. He unblushingly compares himself to some of the greats (Hemingway, Mailer) and believes that his new young-adult production scheme is like the work of Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei, who both hire workers to produce their oversized art. We haven’t heard this kind of boldness from a writer, this claim to an inheritance of a grand tradition, since Norman Mailer died. The best writers now are humble to the point of insanity. Before he went on his Freedom book tour, Jonathan Franzen told Terry Gross on NPR that he just hoped to hand-sell a few copies at local bookstores. (He ended up on the cover of Time.) The younger generation, meanwhile, seems to come in two flavors: the earnestly meek (Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem) and the ironically meek (Gary Shteyngart, Sam Lipsyte, Joshua Ferris). The danger of all this — and it is a real danger — is that their meekness will be taken seriously, and that writing will then be accepted as the natural domain for losers. The world today is filled with graying men who became writers so they could follow in the swaggering footsteps of Mailer, Bellow, and the other giant egos of postwar American letters. But how many young men today read, say, Jonathan Safran Foer’s dollhouse fiction and say, That’s what I want to do with my life?
Why It’s So Hard To Find A Date on Wikipedia
Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List
By NOAM COHEN
In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure.
But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.
About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.
Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women.
I AM NUMBER FOUR B-rolls
George Condo @ The New Museum
Kanye Hugged: A Little Moment With Mr. West at the George Condo Opening
By Nate Freeman
We were standing in front of the titan of pop music at a party last night to celebrate artist George Condo’s first retrospective, Mental States, which opens today at The New Museum. Condo is known for painting his subjects as wild-eyed gaping clown faces, cheeks and foreheads flushed with spiky brushstrokes that intimate explosion, and always featuring distinctive askew-splayed bucked teeth. The most famous of these subjects is Kanye West, whom Condo depicted in flagrante delicto on the cover of his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (another Condo was used as the official album art, however, after Kanye tweeted that the more racy choice had been “banned” by someone).
“I don’t talk to the fuckin’ press!” Kanye West told The Observer.
With that we walked off, thinking incorrectly that we would not speak to Kanye West again that night.
Others at the party were more chatty than the hip-hop star. We ran into a be-stubbled James Frey coming down the extra-slim white hallway that took the art patrons to the main exhibition room. Marc Jacobs sauntered around pecking everyone on the cheek, allowing the stray whiskers of his fuchsia and aquamarine fur scarf to nuzzle against their noses.
Exhibition a
William Gibson’s History of Digital Vandalism
25 Years of Digital Vandalism
By WILLIAM GIBSON
IN January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest version of their heart-monitoring software from piracy. They called it Brain, and it was basically a wheel-clamp for PCs. Computers that ran their program, plus this new bit of code, would stop working after a year, though they cheerfully provided three telephone numbers, against the day. If you were a legitimate user, and could prove it, they’d unlock you.
But in the way of all emergent technologies, something entirely unintended happened. The Alvis’ wheel-clamp was soon copied by a certain stripe of computer hobbyist, who began to distribute it, concealed within various digital documents that people might be expected to want to open. Because almost all these booby-trapped files went out on floppy disks, the virus spread at a pre-Internet snail’s pace.
Still, it did wreak a certain amount of low-grade havoc, freezing computers across the world. The hobbyists did it because they could, or to proudly demonstrate that they could, or to see what would happen, or simply because they thought it was neat.
NUMBER FOUR “Next”
Number Four Scripters Do Charlie’s Angels
‘NUMBER FOUR’ WRITERS BRINGING ‘CHARLIE’S ANGELS’ BACK TO TV
The names Alfred Gough and Miles Millar might not be familiar to you, but the projects they’ve worked on probably are. They created the TV show “Smallville” and wrote the movies “Lethal Weapon 4″ and “Spider-Man 2.” They’ve also written a new movie that hits theaters on February 18, “I Am Number Four.”
Their next project will undoubtedly be familiar to you, too. They’re working on a TV reboot of the iconic ’70s series, “Charlie’s Angels” (which, of course, spun off a couple of hit movies with Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu a decade ago). ABC has already ordered a pilot, and while there will certainly be similarities to the original series, Gough and Millar told us there will be some different twists, as well.
Dianna Agron on NUMBER FOUR Book vs. Screenplay
Dianna Agron on “Differences Between [I Am Number Four] Book and Screenplay”
It happens with every book-to-movie adaptation. Earlier this week, new details emerged about the seventh and final ‘Harry Potter’ film, specifically that the location where the death of a major character takes place will be different in the film than the book. The question becomes, can fans of the book accept a movie that’s not 100% true to the book?
It’s funny that people keep saying Sarah was a cheerleader because it never is really addressed in this script,” she told us when we were on the set of the movie last summer in Pittsburgh. “I know it is in the book — it’s more that she had friends that were kind of the popular kids and her boyfriend is a football player and she’s just kind of done conforming to what other people thinks she should be like. There’s quite a few differences between the book and screenplay, but both are very action-packed.”
The Birth of Tibor de Nagy
When Art Dallied With Poetry on 53rd Street
I don’t believe in golden ages, but I do believe in golden moments. Culturally speaking, New York City has had its share, and one began at the end of 1950 when Tibor de Nagy Gallery opened on 53rd Street near Third Avenue in Manhattan.
To the casual passer-by the undertaking couldn’t have looked auspicious. The gallery was in a dumpy tenement several blocks from the glamorous art hub of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. Most of its artists were young unknowns. And who was Tibor de Nagy? A refugee banker from Hungary with a fancy pedigree but little cash, and a single New York accomplishment: he was a founder — along with a bulky, Buffalo-born leprechaun of a puppeteer and art fanatic named John Bernard Myers — of a children’s marionette theater.
The new gallery with his name had other curious features. It was showing modest portraits and still lifes at a time when abstract painting, the bigger the better, was considered the advanced style. It had female artists on its roster, quite a few. Most eccentrically, the owners, de Nagy (pronounced de NAHJ) and Myers, seemed as interested in new poetry as they were in new art, and were producing a line of books combining the two.