Brilliant actor Paul Scoffield, star of A Man for All Seasons, the Crucible and Quiz Show, has also passed away.David Paul Scofield, CH, CBE (21 January 1922 – 19 March 2008) was an award-winning English actor of stage and screen. Noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, Scofield won both an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award&nbs…

Amateur: barely a few letters from Auteur - but what, in our social media world, is the difference? If there was a dividing line of the 51st Krakow Film Festival, it was between the crowed-sourced YouTube world of Life in a Day and the personal journeys of documakers turning their lives and experiences into art. Less a debate between high and low art, as between the home movie and the knowingly…

Sydney Pollack, director, actor and writer, has passed away from cancer aged 73, and surrounded by his family. Link to LA Times obituary , Wikipedia page, IMDB page. Pollack was a friend and business partner to Anthony Minghella, who also sadly passed away earlier this year. Back in 2001, filmmaker and blogger Tim Clague caught the two legends in conversation at BAFTA, republished below…

Forget Buddhism, Kabbala, and Scientology - there's only one religion that the Hollywood A-list want to be seen to be worshiping these days - Knowledgology. It began five years ago when the Reverend Doctor-Professor Solomon Profundis set up The Knowledge Hub, a spiritual retreat where burned out celebrities could recharge their batteries and at the same time broaden their religious horizons. Her…

Roy Disney, nephew of Walt and general protector of Disney, has passed away. I was lucky enough to meet Roy in 2000 at the Belfast Cinemagic Conference, and it has stood as one of the more memorable encounters of my working life. I was quite nervous beforehand yet without need - he was warm and genuine in his convictions, unassuming with a quiet strength. [Netribution, Dec 2000] Roy worked for…

  If there's one thing more stressful than getting married, it's making a fully improvised comedy about the process in real time. Debbie Isitt, writer and director, kept a diary of the making of her film Confetti, an extravaganza of jealousy, nudity, ball boys....and improvised dialogue.   Coventry. September 2002 I first decided to make a wedding come…

While there is some hint that the new British coalition government will follow through on the Lib Dem policy of rescinding the rushed and hated Digital Economy Bill to let it get full and appropriate scrutiny, I would imagine that many new cabinet members are grateful to Ben Bradshaw and Lord Mandelson for pushing through an unpopular piece of legislation as a parting gift and saving them from ha…

Open source is one of those phrases that gets thrown around, from the Cabinet Office now asking for it in government ICT contracts, to cyber-libertarians saying it heralds the start of a post-capitalist age. But what does it actually mean? And given how much of the for-profit digital world depends on open source - from Android phones to the Safari browser, Facebook’s servers to YouTube’s interfac…

Caine, Hopkins, Connery, Finney, Attenborough, Guinness, Mills, Gielguid, Olivier. Names that epitomise the very best in British acting talent. But one name towers above them all; Sir Wilberforce Reddington. He made his first screen appearance as Willy Reddington playing Third Cockney Urchin in 'It's a Right Bloomin' Caper Alright' in1937. From then on his face became a familiar fixture on Briti…

Thursday, March 19, 2009 To Whom it May Concern: Please in what city and country was the Church bombed in the movie The Reader, where 300 Jewish Woman died.  Are the only survivors Ilana and Rose Mather? Does anyone know if the name of her book is Memoir?  Is this book still in print? Best Regards, Sharon Corr

the horror film franchise is still surprisingly resilient and not really showing signs of slowing (some would say that the current incarnation has outstayed it's welcome). The question i ask is if there is space for a real rough and ready old school horror film that does what it says on the tin? The last good horror for me was Outpost. It didn't make you think too much and had a great genre story…

  Uncover Favourite UK Film and TV Locations When I lived in Oxford a decade or three ago, it would have amazed me to imagine that my modest street in the working-class neighbourhood of Jericho would one day witness scores of escorted tour parties earnestly retracing the murder investigations of Inspector Morse. But at last this sign of the times has gained a name. Set-jetting is d…

  In the rush and work pressures surrounding filmmaking, it's all too easy to overlook some essentials, but these are often the factors that can lift a film from the mundane level to the exceptional. James MacGregor's notes reveal some of the secrets of real film craft.....   Storytelling on Screen Your focus is on telling the story, not just o…

"Is a very powerful love story. There is man. There is woman. Man falls over. Woman falls in love. Man wears funny hat. Oh no! Is woman dying of disease? Yes. Then man fall over some more. She get better. They get married. The end." Roberto Benitio is best know as the Italian comedian and film maker who directed ‘Wasn’t World War Two Fun?’ which swept the board at the Oscars two years ago. He c…

2005 was a turning point in the entertainment industries, the year that Hollywood's tried and tested methods of reaching the masses finally had tio give way - to iPods, TiVos and Xbox 360s. What lessons will 2006 bring? The lesson of changing markets, that's for sure. The best admission of that came from NBC Universal TV chairman Jeff Zucker; "The overall strategy is to make…

Screenwriter and script reader Danny Stack has written up 11 commandments for script readers on his blog. Even if you don't get paid to read, it provides quite an insight into the life of those who write those painful rejection letters. Eg: 7. All Scripts are the Same, but Some are more Samey than Others A lot of scripts follow the generalised style of screenwriting and so-call…

A few months ago I downloaded an open source add-on for Joomla, the (free) software that powers Netribution. It's a powerful tool which should make a nice addition here at some point - and it was free. So impressed was I after half an hour of using it that I checked out some of the add - available for it. I could buy alternative templates for $19 a time, an iPhone version, integration with other…

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and for collaborating with director Stanley Kubrick on the film of the same name, has also died at his home in Sri Lanka.Clarke served in the&nbs…

So that's it then, four years to the day almost, since issue 99 went out, so it's been a while.With this new architecture it has not been too bad. Not a lot of midniht oil burning, although Nic looks to be a little jet-lagged when it gets to tea-time.There's no chance of Netribution losing its non-London centricity either, since our cotributors are well spread from the Smoke to the Shetland Islan…

In 2006 we wrote here about this new idea of crowd-source financing to fund films, which had funded a few short films – a couple of years before IndieGoGo and Kickstarter took off. We'd followed the growth of a new website 'craze' called YouTube, that was making the industry sit up sweaty, followed their first feature filmmakers Arin and Susan and written about alternative exhibition as Secret Ci…

All is clear now. The middle east crisis. Homer Simpson vs Ned Flanders. Almost every fight I've ever had. Thanks Norman McLaren & BoingBoing. (this won the best animated short Oscar in 1952) {google}2976945051371832639{/google}   

Part 1 - Three reasons why the Digital Economy Bill will damage British businesses Part 2 - What can be done? Five steps the UK content industries could take to offset piracy losses A few weeks ago I chatted with a single dad in his 40s, working in a brewery. He's a biker, Sun-reader and towards the right politically, hating to see his taxes used to fund free school meals or asylum seekers. Ne…

Earlier this week I was kindly invited to see the re-opening of Alan Bennett's The History Boys at the Wyndham's Theatre. It was a case of a friend of mine having to go along for a national daily newspaper to get a morsel of something (something, anything, a crumb of gossip, just get someone to say something, anything) to put in their diary pages the following day. The m…

On a day where celebrities seemed to dropping like flies, it's a shame that the obits for British scriptwriter Troy Kennedy Martin  probably won't be as extensive as they should be. Needless to say the man was a man who had a hand in helping to create and write some of the best UK TV shows ever made including 'Z-Cars' and 'The Sweeney'. His TV shows helped pave the way for intelligent genre fare…

  Hollywood producer Alan Haft, former Vice President of Breakheart Films, gives the low down on what Tinsel Town taught him about how to succeed in the business of making movies. In the early 90's,  Haft, with veteran actor James Woods, formed Breakheart Films. While serving as Vice President of Breakheart, Haft was involved with numerous feature films and televis…