Footage

The sharp cracks echoing from the East Bakersfield street were loud enough to jolt Ruben Ceballos from a midnight slumber. Then he heard screams. The 19-year-old jumped from his living room sofa and hurried to the kitchen door, which offered a view of the violent scene outside - Kern County sheriff's deputies repeatedly striking a man in the head with batons as he lay on the pavement. "I saw two sheriff's deputies on top of this guy, just beating him," Ceballos said in an interview Monday.

LAS VEGAS -- When 20th Century Fox unveiled footage of "Life of Pi" at CinemaCon last year, studio executives compared director Ang Lee to Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron. This time around, Fox devoted most of its presentation to its latest year-end awards hopeful, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," directed by and starring Ben Stiller. And when the studio's co-chairman, Jim Gianopulos, introduced Stiller to the crowd, this time he compared the star to Lee -- an association even Stiller seemed to find a bit over the top. "Yes, Ben Stiller and Ang Lee -- the two of us are constantly being compared," the filmmaker said as he walked on stage.

The star trotted toward a small pad in the middle of the 80-foot stage and stopped on his mark. "Look at the camera!" veteran animal trainer Steve Martin commanded. Like a true pro, Shadow, a gray wolf who has made appearances on HBO's "True Blood" series, turned his head and fixed his piercing yellow eyes at the camera operator. "Good boy," another trainer said, tossing him a morsel of meat. PHOTOS: Hollywood Backlot moments The shot was among several animal scenes filmed on the giant green-screen stage at Hollywood Center Studios last week, where a leopard, a lion, a monkey, an elephant and even two grizzly bears from Frasier Park performed simple tasks on the empty stage as a film crew captured their movements, snarls, roars and grunts.

The star trotted toward a small pad in the middle of the 80-foot stage and stopped on his mark. "Look at the camera!" veteran animal trainer Steve Martin commanded. Like a true pro, Shadow, a gray wolf who has made appearances on HBO's "True Blood" series, turned his head and fixed his piercing yellow eyes at the camera operator. "Good boy," another trainer said, tossing him a morsel of meat. PHOTOS: Hollywood Backlot moments The shot was among several animal scenes filmed on the giant green-screen stage at Hollywood Center Studios last week, where a leopard, a lion, a monkey, an elephant and even two grizzly bears from Frasier Park performed simple tasks on the empty stage as a film crew captured their movements, snarls, roars and grunts.

Johnny Carson is getting an upgrade for the YouTube era. Carson Entertainment Group, which owns the archive of the late-night host's 30 years on "The Tonight Show," is set to announce Wednesday that it has digitized all 3,300 hours of existing footage from the program and created a searchable online database for producers and researchers. The library will initially be available just for professional clip-licensing purposes, but the company also plans to release 50 full-format shows on DVD and post a rotating series of historic clips for public viewing on http://www.

Beatles or Stones? It's the oldest question in rock, but in some unreleased archival footage from director Peter Whitehead's " Charlie Is My Darling ," one doesn't have to choose. The lore-inspiring film is soon getting a proper release, and the new edition has some extra footage that will warm the hearts of partisans for either band. The documentary followed the Stones on a tour of Ireland around their time their hit "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" topped charts in 1965. In this new scene, the band plays goofball acoustic takes on the Beatles' "I've Just Seen a face" and "Eight Days a Week.

If watching Alaska women in leotards gyrating in front of snow-capped mountains doesn't sound like your idea of a good time, then you probably won't see the art in the Found Footage Festival, running tonight and Friday at Hollywood's M Bar. But for Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, two Wisconsin-born anthropologists of the ephemeral, it's not just a life's work, it's a calling. "In this media-obsessed culture," says Prueher, festival co-founder, "where everything is deemed worth posting, you need someone to take you through it all. To separate the wheat from the chaff."

Gossip website TMZ.com re-edited graphic footage of a 19-year-old man being shot to death outside a Hollywood nightclub, following an online protest from the teen's family that drew support from more than 212,000 people. The family of the victim, Andre Lowe of South Los Angeles, publicly called on TMZ.com to take down the shaky, hand-held video showing a fist fight that spread into a melee, and ended with two shots being fired and the young man sprawled motionless on the pavement.

"The Devil Inside" was a surprise hit at the box office this weekend - a micro-budget horror film with no stars and plenty of bad reviews, the film came out of nowhere to gross $33.7 million and become the third-highest January opening in Hollywood history. But far from a novelty, "Devil Inside" is the first in a new wave of films that use the conceit of "found footage" - movies that blend fantastical plot lines with supposedly real video - due for release in the coming year.

Can anything be more satisfying than finding the last missing pieces to a puzzle, the critical elements that make the whole thing make sense at last? Turning the discovery even sweeter is finding those precious pieces after more than 80 years of fruitless searching, which is why the theatrical release of the newly reconstituted "Metropolis" has electrified the early-film world. Starting Friday, audiences will be able to see how good it is that what was lost was found, will understand why one grateful expert has said this is "akin to recovering lost books of the Bible."

Movie theater owners will converge in Las Vegas this week for their annual convention, checking out new hybrids of popcorn, the latest iterations of stadium seats and clips from potential summer blockbusters including "Star Trek Into Darkness," "Man of Steel" and "The Lone Ranger. " A few studios, though, will use CinemaCon as a chance to give their year-end films a head start before the crowded holiday season. Twentieth Century Fox will unveil footage from its planned Christmas release "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," one of the longest-in-development movies in recent Hollywood history.

Fans of the 2011 artsploitation hit “Drive” have been on tenterhooks waiting for more footage from “Only God Forgives,” the Thai Western that director Nicolas Refn had been talking about for months, then went ahead and cast his “Drive” star Ryan Gosling in. They can rest a little easier - or feel their blood pressure climb further--at the first sign of extensive footage from the 2013 release.  The red-band trailer for the new phantasma...

Cut together from a reported 10,000 hours of footage from the BBC's natural history archives, the wildlife documentary "One Life" is a visually gorgeous, at times astonishing screen experience. Co-writer/directors Michael Gunton and Martha Holmes have crafted a vivid and immersive look at an eye-popping variety of animals - and one unique plant - from essentially birth to rebirth. Along the way, this globe-hopping journey stops for intriguing glimpses of such key life chapters as maternal nurturing, the endless quest for food, battling nature's predators, mating rituals and creating the various species' next generations.

NEW YORK - In the 30 years that David France, director of the Oscar-nominated AIDS activism documentary "How to Survive a Plague," has lived at the corner of 7th Street and Avenue C, the neighborhood has transformed dramatically. During the worst years of the epidemic in the 1980s, death pervaded this far corner of the East Village. "It was inescapable. You would see people who were skinny, skinny skeletons trying to catch their breath, wheelchairs with men in their 20s, the KS [Kaposi's sarcoma]

In the never-ending effort to make Shakespeare "relevant" and "accessible," it never hurts to enlist celebrities for the hard sell. "Shakespeare Uncovered," a six-part documentary series that begins airing Friday on PBS, boasts an abundance of famous faces. The series is hosted by the likes of Jeremy Irons, Ethan Hawke and Joely Richardson, and features interviews with Helen Mirren, Jude Law and Vanessa Redgrave, who is Richardson's mother. The series contemplates a handful of Shakespeare's plays, visiting stage productions past and present, as well as several filmed adaptations.

Gossip website TMZ.com re-edited graphic footage of a 19-year-old man being shot to death outside a Hollywood nightclub, following an online protest from the teen's family that drew support from more than 212,000 people. The family of the victim, Andre Lowe of South Los Angeles, publicly called on TMZ.com to take down the shaky, hand-held video showing a fist fight that spread into a melee, and ended with two shots being fired and the young man sprawled motionless on the pavement.

Missing footage from Fritz Lang's classic 1927 film "Metropolis" has been discovered in a small museum in Argentina. "We were overjoyed when we heard about the find," said Helmut Possmann, head of the German foundation that owns the rights to the silent film. "We no longer believed we'd see this. Time and again we had had calls about supposed footage but were disappointed." With its cold, monumental vision of mechanized society, "Metropolis" forged a template for generations of science-fiction cinema, and its enduring influence has been cited on films from "Blade Runner" to "Fahrenheit 451" and "Star Wars."

Writer-director Phil Alden Robinson ("Field of Dreams") will present footage taken during the siege of Sarajevo at the Los Angeles Public Library's Central Library on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Mark Taper Auditorium. Hosted by the Central Library, PEN Center USA West and the Hollywood Policy Center, "Reflections on Bosnia" will also feature Maher Mathout, senior adviser to the Muslim Public Affairs Council; Matthew Naythons, author of "Sarajevo: A Portrait of the Siege"; and Michael J.

Back in 2000, the L.A. producer/musical gadfly Jon Brion pitched a TV pilot to VH1. "The Jon Brion Show" was pegged as a kind of neo-variety show with guest musicians (a familiar format to anyone who knows his Largo roundtables). Director Paul Thomas Anderson even lent his hand to the pilot. The network declined to pick it up, but Anderson on Thursday posted a video with a note on his YouTube channel: " I tore up the floorboards at H.Q. the other day  and came up with this little number on VHS.  She holds up well.

Written by Marlon Wayans and Rick Alvarez and not so much directed as vaguely steered by Michael Tiddes, "A Haunted House" is a ramshackle parody of recent found-footage horror movies in the vein of the "Scary Movie" movies. If you already saw the titles referenced here, mostly the "Paranormal Activity" films, the otherwise forgotten "The Devil Inside" and kind of "The Exorcist" - the crucifix but not the pea soup - there may be a certain passing feeling of being in on the joke. The problem is that's all the joke there is. "A Haunted House" revolves around Malcolm (Wayans)