Filmmakers

No woman was ever ruined by a book, New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker famously said, but filmmakers are always being seduced by them, with unlucky audiences left to pay the price. The latest case in point is "Cloud Atlas," which has been turned into a film with muddled, frustrating results. It's not difficult to see why the filmmaking Wachowski siblings joined forces with Tom Tykwer to jointly write and direct a version of David Mitchell's hugely ambitious novel. It's a book that deals with, as Andy Wachowski has said, "the sum of human experience," that unabashedly investigates what is important in life.

Silent slapstick filmmaker Mack Sennett moved to Los Angeles in 1913, setting up shop in what is now Echo Park, and began to make short movies starring an upstart comedian named Charlie Chaplin. Three years later, he built a set of soundstages to make movies with his movie star girlfriend, Mabel Normand. Now those Silver Lake soundstages, which became part of the Mack Sennett Studios, are getting a face-lift under new owners. PHOTOS: Hollywood Backlot moments Jesse Rogg, a Grammy-nominated music producer, bought the production space for about $3.3 million this year from Stephen Collins, a former photographer who owned the property for nearly three decades.

Thomas Horn, 14, was standing in the middle of a cocktail party populated with adults when director Brett Ratner walked over to the teenager to offer him a congratulatory pat on the shoulder. Days before the late December release of "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" - in which Horn stars as Oskar Schell, a boy struggling to come to grips with the loss of his father, played by Tom Hanks, in the Sept. 11 attacks - he and other cast members were being feted in the lobby of a building that houses the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Film Archive.

Two years, two states. In 2009, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad laid out a plan to end the decades-long territorial stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians. But by 2011, despite Fayyad's efforts, including a successful campaign to improve Palestinians' economic and institutional infrastructure - a kind of "if you build it, statehood will come" - the situation remained deadlocked. This period of hope, progress, frustration and fracture is examined with equanimity and clarity by Israeli filmmaker Dan Setton in the absorbing documentary "State 194. " Setton focuses on the seemingly level-headed, optimistic Fayyad as he navigated the choppy waters of domestic politics and international diplomacy while pressing the United Nations for statehood and to make it its 194th member nation.

WhenWalt Disney Co.executives gave the greenlight to the project that became the Martian adventure film"John Carter,"they hoped they were launching the studio's next big franchise. It was to be directed by Andrew Stanton, who had been associated with a string of successful Pixar Animation Studios films - starting with the 1995 hit "Toy Story. " The source material was a century-old sci-fi touchstone that had inspired filmmakers including George Lucas and James Cameron. The movie would fit perfectly into Disney Chairman and Chief ExecutiveRobert A. Iger's big-picture plan to produce movies that would spawn sequels, become theme park attractions and drive sales of "John Carter" merchandise.

A few days before filmmakers for the hit Fox TV series "House" were set to shoot a prison scene at a former boys correctional facility, the show's location manager, Nancy Haecker, got a phone call that made her stomach churn. Deputy State Fire Marshal Al Adams informed her that he could not clear the way for the July shoot because the vacant Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility in Whittier was overgrown and posed too much of a fire hazard. Determined not to disappoint her director, Haecker and her crew sprang into action.

With their 2007 low-budget documentary-style horror movie "[REC]," Spanish filmmakers Paco Plaza and Jaume Balagueró harnessed the manic spirit of first-person shooter video games to find a fresh take on the blood-soaked zombie genre. But recapturing that same kind of frenzied energy for their follow-up, "[REC] 2," which opens Friday and is also currently available on video on demand, proved challenging. Audiences had seen the creatures terrorizing the inhabitants of a Barcelona apartment block in the first film, so the element of surprise was gone.

In Sacha Gervasi's "Hitchcock," director Alfred Hitchcock begins the production of "Psycho" by having his cast and crew swear an oath not to divulge any of the film's secrets. The first day of filming of "Hitchcock" itself followed a different route, with Gervasi, who was making his narrative feature debut on the film, feeling both "wonderful" and "panic. " In this excerpt from the fourth annual Envelope Directors Roundtable, our panel of six filmmakers-- Tom Hooper ( "Les Miserables" )

WASHINGTON -- There is no evidence that Mike Vickers, the Pentagon's undersecretary for intelligence, disclosed classified information when he spoke to the makers of the film "Zero Dark Thirty," the Pentagon's chief spokesman said Tuesday. “There is a pending inspector general investigation on the question of whether Mr. Vickers provided classified information in an interview with the filmmakers of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' ” Pentagon spokesman George Little said. When the Department of Defense reviewed a transcript of Vickers' conversation with the filmmakers after it was requested under the Freedom of Information Act, Little said, none of the material was deemed to be classified.

When it comes to “Zero Dark Thirty,” there's been a lot written about the CIA and torture - whether it looked in real life the way it does on screen, whether it was effective, whether it was ethical. As we've been reporting this week, John McCain and other lawmakers don't agree it went down that way . The film, they say, misrepresents how the CIA found Osama bin Laden. Filmmakers say they've created an accurate depiction. Now that the movie has opened, we thought we'd ask you what you thought of the scenes.

With the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 's expansive "Stanley Kubrick" exhibition set to close on June 30, the museum's film department is revisiting several key movies in the maverick filmmaker's oeuvre. Each of the director's films in the series "Kubrick and Co. " will be paired with an important work by another filmmaker, including Michaelangelo Antonioni ("Red Desert"), Ingmar Bergman ("Hour of the Wolf"), Sam Fuller ("China Gate") and Max Ophuls ("Lola Montes"). The series opens May 31 with Kubrick's 1957 anti-war film, "Paths of Glory," starring Kirk Douglas, followed by Joseph Losey's 1957 drama "Time Without Pity," revolving around a man's (Michael Redgrave)

The reason the bike lane on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles is bright fluorescent green is so drivers and bicyclists alike can see it easily and avoid running into one another. However, the very conspicuousness of that color has brought on a collision between politics and business in the city. Bicyclists and downtown neighborhood groups are fans of the 1.4-mile stretch of green bike lane on Spring Street from Cesar Chavez to 9th Street. But location scouts and production managers who bring filming to the city's historic downtown core are not so happy.

French filmmaker Olivier Assayas has said all of his films have autobiographical elements in them, even if the exact details may be unrecognizable across his wide-ranging body of work. Assayas' sensitive portrayals of the changes in contemporary life, touching on globalization, technology and personal relationships, led the Austrian critic Alexander Horwath, in a recent book preface, to declare the filmmaker "one of the defining voices in the past quarter-century of cinema. " "Cold Water," Assayas' international breakthrough in 1994 about teenage romance and self-discovery, was the most obviously autobiographical of his films.

Zach Braff made headlines last week when he became one of the first top-tier Hollywood personalities to try -- and succeed in -- financing a movie via Kickstarter. Just a few days after listing his idiosyncratic project “Wish I Was Here,” which he aims to direct and star in, he had raised the Kickstarter target of $2 million to make the movie. The total is now at about $2.3 million and 31,000 backers, with three weeks to go.) It was a remarkable turnaround. For nearly a year, Braff, 38, had tried to make the dramatic comedy about a thirtysomething Los Angeles man who decides to homeschool his children.

Watching "André Gregory: Before and After Dinner" often feels like visiting with an elegant, genial, slightly mystifying old friend. Too bad Cindy Kleine, the documentary's producer-director-narrator - and Gregory's wife - didn't better organize this rangy survey of the eclectic actor, theater director, artist and raconteur. While the title references Louis Malle's 1981 classic "My Dinner With André," which Gregory, now 78, co-wrote and starred in with collaborator and pal Wallace Shawn, Kleine spends little time on Gregory's signature screen role.

On the campus of "Video Game High School," gamers are the ultimate jocks. The best players appear on television chat shows. They even get dates. The nine-part original Web series, which combines high school romances and dramas with video game-inspired race sequences and action scenes, attracted some 50 million online views in its first season. A second season is expected to debut in July. It's the brainchild of Freddie Wong and Brandon Laatsch - the collaborative duo behind the popular FreddieW channel on YouTube - and co-creator Matt Arnold.

The White House on Wednesday defended its decision to grant filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow and others access to top officials to discuss the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and called claims from a senior Republican lawmaker that classified information was being compromised for political ends "ridiculous. " New York Rep. Peter T. King, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, sent a letter to officials at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency on Tuesday expressing concern about "ongoing leaks of classified information regarding sensitive military operations.

Dan Katzir was a thirtysomething Israeli filmmaker on vacation in New York City when he was accosted by 84-year-old Zypora Spaisman on the subway. The bird-weight octogenarian had been a star and director of New York City's Folksbiene, the oldest-running Yiddish theater in America, but when she met Katzir, she was in the midst of her last show, a production of 1916's "Green Fields," for the Yiddish Public Theater, which she founded in 2000. The play was slated to close in eight days -- on New Year's Eve -- and Spaisman, desperate to prevent that from happening, was not above soliciting help from attractive young strangers on the R train.

First impressions can be tricky. That's one of the lessons painfully and humorously driven home by the upcoming comedy "Peeples," starring Craig Robinson as an ordinary guy who crashes his girlfriend's posh family weekend in the Hamptons while trying to impress her domineering father. Naturally things don't go quite according to plan for Robinson's character, Wade, and by the time he shows up at the home of the Honorable Judge Virgil Peeples, he's rumpled, wallet-less and slicked with dog slobber.

Not long after Paul Feig created the beloved cult TV series "Freaks and Geeks" in 1999, studios began barraging him with coming-of-age sex comedy scripts, even though "Freaks," with its sweet, sympathetic portrait of the perils of adolescence, was spiritually opposed to that kind of lunkheaded, frat-boy humor. The mild-mannered Feig, the self-described "awkward guy" in high school, couldn't relate to any of the material's high-concept, horn dog ideas ("nerds don't hang out with frat guys unless you're Karl Rove trying to get in with them")