Filmmakers

Often film sequels are slam dunks at the box office, a seamless continuation from where a previous hit left off. But as the new installment of the 15-year-old franchise "Men in Black" proves, getting to the big screen isn't always a cakewalk. One of the most troubled productions in recent Hollywood memory, Sony Pictures' latest movie in the Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones sci-fi-comedy franchise encountered multiple script rewrites, a discontented star and a three-month production shutdown as writers and studio executives scrambled to fix a project that nearly fell apart . By the time it was over, the studio had run up a tab of nearly $250 million - making "Men in Black 3" one of the most expensive releases of the summer.

WASHINGTON - In the months after the U.S. militarymission that killed Osama bin Laden, Pentagon officials met with Hollywood filmmakers and gave them special access in an effort to influence the creation of a film about the operation, newly released documents show. Emails and meeting transcripts obtained from the Pentagon and CIA through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch suggest that officials went out of their way to assist the filmmakers, while trying to keep their cooperation from becoming public.

With all the attention on celebrity and glamour at the Academy Awards, it's rare that the award for short documentary film gets much notice. But that's what happened this year when director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy received the Oscar for documentary short with co-director Daniel Junge for "Saving Face," which looks at the more than 150 acid attacks upon Pakistani women each year. In an impassioned speech, Obaid-Chinoy, a Muslim and Pakistani, dedicated the award to "all the women in Pakistan who are working for change.

WASHINGTON -- In the months after the U.S. military mission that killed Osama bin Laden, Pentagon officials met with Hollywood filmmakers and gave them special access in an effort to influence the creation of a film about the operation, newly released documents show. Emails and meeting transcripts obtained from the Pentagon and CIA through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the watchdog group Judicial Watch suggest that officials went out of their way to assist the filmmakers, while trying to avoid the public learning of their cooperation.

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.

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.

At first, the email rants from readers expressing their distress about Hollywood's increasing reliance on foul language were a mere trickle. Like the way one couple lost faith in one of their favorite actors, Paul Rudd, mortified by his graphic pep talk to his private part in"Wanderlust. " Before those complaints could be chalked up to a prudish few, they grew into a steady stream of frustration, such as the distinct distaste for the dialogue in writer-director-actress Jennifer Westfeldt's indie comedy"Friends With Kids.

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.

"The Swell Season" basically begins with a haircut. Marketa Irglova is giving Glen Hansard a trim in a hotel room some hours before they'll take the stage, the distinctive indie rock music they make together providing the soundtrack. It's an ordinary moment in this extraordinary documentary, so intimate and so natural, you feel as if you've stumbled into the room by mistake. You'll recognize the couple immediately if you're one of the many captivated by the film "Once," the tiny Irish romantic musical drama in which they starred a few years ago. Or maybe you caught them at the 2008 Academy Awards, when they gave a memorable, heartfelt acceptance speech after winning the songwriting Oscar for "Once.

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.

Video-on-demand services usually come into play toward the end of a film's life span — either to follow a theatrical run or to take a movie straight to video. For the website Prescreen, however, VOD is the launching pad. Prescreen, which debuted in September, offers users a curated selection of independent films, most available for 60 days and many exclusive to the site. A single film is spotlighted in a daily email, and most rentals cost $2 to $8 for a 48-hour viewing window.

At first, the email rants from readers expressing their distress about Hollywood's increasing reliance on foul language were a mere trickle. Like the way one couple lost faith in one of their favorite actors, Paul Rudd, mortified by his graphic pep talk to his private part in"Wanderlust. " Before those complaints could be chalked up to a prudish few, they grew into a steady stream of frustration, such as the distinct distaste for the dialogue in writer-director-actress Jennifer Westfeldt's indie comedy"Friends With Kids.

Harun Mehmedinovic remembers the hungry wild dogs clawing through the snow, trying to get to frozen bodies of victims of the siege of Sarajevo. He was 10 years old. The Bosnian war was in its second year. Less than 15 years later, the war was over, and Mehmedinovic had graduated from UCLA film school and earned a master's degree from the American Film Institute, where he wrote and directed his thesis film, "In the Name of the Son. " The 25-minute short helped the young filmmaker become the first student in AFI's history to win both its top directing prizes, the Franklin J. Schaffner Fellow Award and the Richard P. Rogers Spirit of Excellence Award.

Five years after he was first indicted and after two prosecutions ended in mistrials, a Los Angeles-based maker and distributor of niche fetish films was convicted Friday of federal obscenity charges. Ira Isaacs, who produced, sold and sometimes acted in films depicting scatology and bestiality, was convicted on five counts of selling and distributing obscene material, based on films he sold through a site he advertised as "the Web's largest fetish VHS, DVD superstore. " The seven-woman, five-man jury deliberated for less than two hours Friday after a weeklong trial, the bulk of which was made up of the screening of four films, two of them Isaacs' own creations.

"The Raven"stars John Cusack in a gothic thriller pulled from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe that regrettably falls prey to its grand and grisly ambitions - it's neither grand nor grisly enough to seriously satisfy Poe-ish cravings for murder, mystery and literary allusions. More pulp fiction than macabre masterpiece, it is nevertheless a nifty idea screenwriters Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare have concocted for director James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta"). Imagine a serial killer in 19th century Baltimore suddenly replicating Poe's stories, the murders mimicking those in "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," among others.

Anida Yoeu Ali and Masahiro Sugano were excited when they heard about the White House video contest on issues affecting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. They spent two weeks putting together a three-minute film on the plight of Cambodian deportees, then watched as online views outpaced the competition. But they found out last month that they didn't win, and since then have been unable to find out how the contest was decided. They, and one contest winner, think the film's topic cut too close to a controversy over the record number of immigrants deported by the Obama administration.

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.

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.

Polar bears tend to be camera shy, which caused problems for the filmmakers of the newWarner Bros./Imax adventure"To the Arctic,"opening Friday. The 40-minute 3-D documentary examines extreme temperature changes in the Arctic, which has led to the permanent ice pack melting quickly and endangering the existence of animals such as polar bears, caribou, seals, walruses and birds that are indigenous to the region. Narrated by Meryl Streep, "To the Arctic" is the latest movie from two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Greg MacGillivray ("The Living Sea," "Dolphins")

Half a century ago, the writer C.P. Snow famously coined the phrase "the two cultures," referring to the widening gulf between the sciences and the arts. Few have bridged that chasm of incomprehension with as much verve and ingenuity as the American filmmaker and theorist Hollis Frampton. "I am a spectator of mathematics like others are spectators of soccer or pornography," Frampton once said. Much of his work implicitly affirms the connections between poetry and mathematics: the mutual interests in form, the role in both fields of imaginative leaps and abstract thinking.