Guy Adams is The Independent's Los Angeles correspondent. He lives in Malibu, and divides his time between the local beach and the Hollywood Hills. He headed out west in May 2008, and has being trying to make sense of the First City of Showbusiness ever since. You can track his every move at twitter.com/guyadams.
The Bourne films represent one the most valuable franchises in Hollywood, with the last in the series making back $440m (four times its budget), at the box office alone. So goodness knows what crisis meetings are being held tonight amid reports that Matt Damon is about to make himself unavailable for the fourth in [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Tuesday, 1 December 2009 at 6:54 am
There’s a classic episode of South Park which revolves around a simple observation: while racism against African Americans, or Latinos, or Native Americans has become firmly unacceptable, mainstream US culture can be surprisingly tolerant of discrimination against people who happen to boast a foreign nationality.
I was reminded of this satirical trumph (which you can watch [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Monday, 23 November 2009 at 3:11 am
Earlier this year, Sir David Frost announced to much fanfare that he was to executive-produce a remake of the classic WW2 movie Dambusters, in conjunction with the Director, Producer and all round film mogul Peter Jackson.
A full-scale replica of a Lancaster bomber was built. Stephen Fry was brought in to write the script, and many [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Tuesday, 10 November 2009 at 2:28 am
Mr Michael Moore is a very great documentary maker; possibly the best that Hollywood has ever seen. His Oscar-winning ability to weave heart-rending anecdote into a multi-layered narrative is enhanced, to my mind, by a truly admirable concern for the common man. He stands for fairness; for political and social justice. His films, without exception, [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Wednesday, 28 October 2009 at 5:16 am
Whichever way you look at it, the past few weeks have been tricky for the Church of Scientology’s normally-smooth PR machine.
First, a trial in the Bahamas reignited public controversy over celebrity member John Travolta’s late son Jett, whose death was connected to autism – a psychological condition that the Church claims doesn’t actually exist.
Then hatchet-merchant [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Monday, 26 October 2009 at 4:29 am
If you fancy a jaw-dropping insight into the paranoid excesses of both the Hollywood PR machine and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, try reading this account of journalist John Ortved’s dealings with the channel behind The Simpsons.
A few years back, Mr Ortved wrote about the hit cartoon series for Vanity Fair. More recently, he authorised an unauthorised history of [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Thursday, 15 October 2009 at 3:46 am
Another day, another distasteful attempt to extract cash from Michael Jackson’s death ends in the hands of lawyers.
Not 24 hours after they released his new, final single “This is it,” the late singer’s estate has been forced to admit that the song isn’t actually new. And it wasn’t entirely Jackson’s work either.
Instead,the track was co-written with the [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Tuesday, 13 October 2009 at 2:26 am
It’s an article of faith among the collection of Hollywood liberals and French people lobbying for the release of Roman Polanski (above) that the film director only skipped the USA prior to sentencing in his 1977 child sex abuse trial because he had been the victim of a horiffic mistrial.
Central to their argument is a [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 11:07 pm
The weekend's US box office figures provide a very topical illustration of the harsh financial realities that lay behind the recent cloak-and-dagger sacking of Disney’s studio head Dick Cook (above left).
Making $15m, the Bruce Willis sci-fi film Surrogates came in at second place in the charts, failing to take the top spot from the digital animation [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Monday, 28 September 2009 at 3:19 am
Fascinating documents were unsealed in Los Angeles today revealing affidavits that have been filed in evidence against two of the doctors who treated Anna Nicole Smith in the run-up to her death.
The quacks, Khristine Eroshevich and Sandeep Kapoor, stand accused of illegally supplying Smith (reality TV star, model, and widow of octogenarian oil baron J [...]
By Guy Adams | The Foreign Desk | Tuesday, 22 September 2009 at 6:03 am
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