Taking Woodstock
Taking Woodstock is the new film from Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee – and it’s a trip!
Based on the memoirs of Elliot Tiber, the comedy stars Demetri Martin as Elliot, who inadvertently played a role in making 1969’s Woodstock Music and Arts Festival into the famed happening it was. Featuring a standout ensemble cast, and songs from a score of ’60s musical icons including The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe and the Fish – plus a new recording of “Freedom” from Richie Havens – Taking Woodstock is a joyous voyage to a moment in time when everything seemed possible.
Synopsis: Working as an interior designer in Greenwich Village, Elliot feels empowered by the gay rights movement. But he is also still staked to the family business – a dumpy Catskills motel called the El Monaco that is being run into the ground by his overbearing parents, Jake and Sonia Teichberg (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton). In the summer of 1969, Elliot has to move back upstate to the El Monaco in order to help save the motel from being taken over by the bank.
Upon hearing that a planned music and arts festival has lost its permit from the neighboring town of Wallkill, NY, Elliot calls producer Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) at Woodstock Ventures to offer his family’s motel to the promoters and generate some much-needed business. Elliot also introduces Lang to his neighbor Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), who operates a 600-acre dairy farm down the road. Soon the Woodstock staff is moving into the El Monaco – and half a million people are on their way to Yasgur’s farm for “3 days of Peace & Music in White Lake.”
Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock Trailer
Focus Features has released trailer for Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock“.
The movie based on the book of the same name written by Elliot Tiber, follows his 1969 true story, an aspiring Greenwich Village interior designer whose parents owned a small motel in Upstate New York and at the time held the only musical festival permit in the entire town of Bethel, New York. Tiber (Demetri Martin) offered both the Catskills motel and the permit to the Woodstock Festival’s organizers. The film also focuses on Tiber’s life as a closeted gay man hiding his marijuana as well as sexual orientation from his family, and his self-discovery following the Stonewall Riots.
James Schamus wrote the script for the drama which stars Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman, Jonathan Groff, Mamie Gummer, Eugene Levy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Liev Schreiber.
Focus is planning an August release for “Taking Woodstock.”
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Ang Lee To Head Venice Film Festival Jury
Director Ang Lee (”Hulk” from 2003, “The Hire: Chosen,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon“) will head Venice Film Festival jury this year.
Ang Lee twice won the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion award.
The Taiwanese-born director won the award in 2007 for “Lust, Caution,” and in 2005 for “Brokeback Mountain,” for which he also won a best directing Oscar.
His next movies are “Taking Woodstock” and “A Little Game.”
The festival made the announcement Friday. Last year’s jury was headed by German film director Wim Wenders.
Venice Film Festival will be held September 2-12, 2009.
Oscar-Winner Ang Lee May Direct “Life of Pi”
Yann Martel’s coming-of-age survival tale “Life of Pi” was a huge bestseller in 2000 and the film rights were snapped up almost immediately. Eight years after its publication and six years after it was optioned by the specialty film division of Twentieth Century Fox, “Life of Pi” has a new prospective director: Ang Lee, the Chinese-born auteur who won an Oscar for his direction of “Brokeback Mountain.”
Ang Lee
Previous directors attached to the project include Dean Georgaris, M. Night Shyamalan and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
The story revolves around a youth who is the lone survivor of a sunken freighter and winds up sharing a lifeboat with a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan and a hungry Bengal tiger. The novel was published in 2001 and won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year.
Ang Lee is currently finishing his “Taking Woodstock” film, which was based on Tom Monte’s book. The film is expected to arrive in theaters in August from Focus Features. He will reportedly supervise a new script after the studio hires a writer.
China has blocked ‘Shanghai’
China has blocked a Hollywood movie reportedly starring John Cusack and Gong Li from being shot in the country because of concerns about the script.
Luan Guozhi, director of international cooperation at China’s Film Bureau, declined to reveal the government’s concerns about the story for “Shanghai,” but said the filmmakers could make changes and reapply.
“We suggest they make some changes to the script and resubmit their application,” he said.
“Shanghai” is about an American who investigates his friend’s death in World War II-era Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
Zhang Ziyi and Ken Watanabe in ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’
Producer Mike Medavoy confirmed China’s decision to block the shoot, but didn’t give a reason for the denial.
Filmmakers have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and director Mikael Hafstrom has been in China since September preparing for the movie.
According to Variety, Hafstrom plans to move the shoot to Hong Kong.
Variety has reported the movie stars Cusack, China’s Gong Li and Japan’s Ken Watanabe, and that producers are in negotiations with Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-fat.
Japan’s World War II-era invasion of China is a sensitive topic, especially about Nanjing, where historians say Japanese troops killed 150,000 Chinese civilians and raped tens of thousands of women in 1937.
Other filmmakers have had difficulty getting official approval for projects set in the same era.
Oscar winner Ang Lee acknowledged he edited dialogue in his spy thriller “Lust, Caution,” also set in World War II-era Japanese-occupied Shanghai, so that the main character would appear less of a traitor to the Chinese cause.
“Memoirs of a Geisha,” a Hollywood movie starring Gong Li and another major Chinese star, Zhang Ziyi, as Japanese entertainers, wasn’t shown in China amid speculation officials feared the film would spark a major backlash.
