Jake Gyllenhaal heads to the gym with brunette

Jake Gyllenhaal with a female friend heading to the gym in New York City on May 18, 2013


Jake Gyllenhaal is one prized piece of eye candy, yet he clearly didn't want to cause a frenzy as he left a gym in New York City's Soho neighborhood on Saturday.Strolling through the parking lot alongside a mystery female friend, the 32-year-old actor kept a low profile by staying covered up in a hooded grey sweatshirt, baseball cap, and a pair of opaque sunglasses that his his baby blues.Under his zip-up, the End Of Watch star donned a casual grey T-shirt and loose-fitted black athletic pants that he teamed with cool Nike kicks.


Gyllenhaal is also rumoured to be dating model Emily DiDonato, but she isn't the same female gym buddy who was spotted on Saturday.
According to Us Weekly, the two have been dating for 'a month of two,' but neither have gone public with their romance yet. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Marilyn Monroe: My Little Secret & White Rose

Andy Warhol's 1962 pop-art multiple images of Marilyn Monroe sold for $38.2 million on Thursday. The original silk screen grid, titled Four Marilyns, had been expected to fetch about $30 million. Reports said that it was purchased by Victoria Gelfand, a director at the Gagosian Gallery, at the Park Avenue salesroom of Phillips. Just one day earlier paintings by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat smashed all previous auction records at Christies. To put the sale in some perspective, Marilyn Monroe's 12 feature films averaged $7 million in total worldwide ticket sales.


Her biggest hit, 1959's Some Like It Hot, earned $25 million. Her next biggest, 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, took in $12 million. The remaining films collected between $2.5 million and $8.4 million each. Even accounting for inflation, most of the Monroe films' earnings would not have matched the amount earned by the Warhol creation." Source: www.contactmusic.com

"Marilyn Monroe: My Little Secret" Ranked as one of the Top 20 Marilyn Books. 1 Year after its release, the controversial book Marilyn Monroe: My Little Secret by author Tony Jerris, has been ranked as one of the Top 20 Marilyn Monroe books on the market by Gutsy Books. The story began in 2001 when Jerris met Jane Lawrence, who knew Marilyn Monroe very well. They became close friends and she told him her story. At 12, she started Marilyn’s fan club at Fox. According to Jerris, “By the time Jane was 15, her relationship with Marilyn had become physically intimate. Marilyn referred to Jane as 'my little secret,' and I couldn’t have chosen a more fitting title.”


Marilyn Monroe: My Little Secret is a provocative, poignant, no-holds-barred account of the relationship between Jane and Marilyn, which Tony has written in Ms. Lawrence’s voice. It took Jerris over 10 years to reach and write the book, and was released 1 year ago on the 50th Anniversary of Marilyn’s death. It has been featured on a variety of media outlets such as ExtraTV and The Young Turks Show, and written up in numerous worldwide publications and online sites including The Globe, The Enquirer, The Daily Mirror, Radar Online, Perez Hilton & Hidden Hollywood News. It was also named one of 2012’s Top Scandals in The Globe, and continues to be written up in numerous magazines and websites. Source: www.pr.com


"Marilyn's eyes opened wide in surprise and she burst out laughing. She took a swig of Dom. "Now you're my agent?" Marilyn poured more champagne and winked at me. "Five hundred bucks a week. Not bad for a girl from Van Nuys, uh?" I sipped my Coke, satisfied that Marilyn was not being snookered. Grace McKee (Gladys's best friend and fellow film tech at Columbia Pictures, whom Norma Jeane would refer to as Aunt Grace) was one of the few who truly loved Norma Jeane. As Norma Jeane's legal guardian, Grace promised to take care of her until Gladys could recover and return to society. Grace was a huge fan of Jean Harlow, so Norma Jean also became a big fan." -"Marilyn Monroe: My Little Secret" (2012) by Tony Jerris


The giant Marilyn Monroe sculpture with the forever billowing skirt has stood at Palm Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way in Palm Springs for a year, but it will be moving on in June. Before then, there's a film series and farewell party planned. So go, snap some pictures and see the movies that made her a film icon.


The deal: The Forever Marilyn Outdoor Movie Series on May 3 will screen the comedy "Monkey Business" (1952), in which Monroe stars with Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, and the thriller "Niagara" with Joseph Cotten on May 17. There also are screenings of new short films from ShortFest on June 7. All events start at 8:30 p.m. Source: www.latimes.com


"Black Dahlia & White Rose" is one of the short stories from "L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories" (2011), a re-imagining of the last days of a tragic figure of Los Angeles lore, Elizabeth Short, who became immortalized posthumously as “The Black Dahlia”. Mixing fact with fiction and a bit of legend, the story tells of Elizabeth Short sharing an L.A. apartment with a young Marilyn Monroe in 1947.


For the old life was used-up & of no promise, in Medford, MA. And the golden California life beckoned—Los Angeles & Hollywood. It did not seem a far-fetched idea to Betty Short as to Cleo Short or anyone who knew them, that daughter Betty was pretty enough & “sexy” enough to be a movie star one day. That was a happy time, those months then. They did not last long but Norma Jeane said to me when we were new & shy to each other sharing a room in Mr. Hansen’s “mansion” on Buena Vista Avenue: Oh Betty you are so lucky! for Norma Jeane said she had not ever glimpsed her father even from a distance but now that she’d been on the covers of Swank & Stars & Stripes maybe he would see her & recognize her as his. Poor Norma Jeane had faith, if she worked hard & made the right connections among the Hollywood men, like all of us, she would become a star like Betty Grable, Lana Turner, & earlier Jean Harlow who was Norma Jeane’s model & idol. Norma Jeane said if she walked into some place eyes would flash on her and people would think—Ohh is that Jean Harlow?


Lots of guys would claim her—seeing she’d one day be “Marilyn Monroe”—but in 1945 at the Radioplane factory in Burbank, Norma Jeane was just a girl-worker in denim coveralls—eighteen—not even the prettiest girl at the factory but Norma had something—“photogenic”—nobody else had. I took her picture for Stars & Stripes—in those factory-girl coveralls seen from the front, the rear, the side—“to boost the morale of G.I.’s overseas. And the phone rang off the hook—Who’s the girl? She’s a humdinger.


Betty said: You can get money from men—if they’re the right men not these God-damn bloodsuckers. Betty seemed angry at most men. She’d been engaged to a major in the US Army Air Corps she had met at Camp Cooke—this was said of her by girls who’d known her longer than me—& her fiancé had died in a plane crash—



BETTY SHORT: "Dr. M. drove me back to the Buena Vista in the beautiful black Packard car & said very few words to me—asked where I lived & was I a “starlet” —& stared straight ahead through the windshield of the car— Where does it seem that I am from, then?—I asked him with a sidelong smile. He continued to drive the Packard slow along the street as other vehicles passed us & his forehead furrowed & he said finally—I could not guess. I would think that you are born of Hollywood—you have stepped out of a movie—or of the night. Out of the night—this struck me, it was a strange thing to say & flattering to me & so I thought He is attracted to me. He will fall in love with me—he will be in my power." -"Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories" (2012) by Joyce Carol Oates's story


Scarlett Johansson posing as Anti-Marilyn Monroe for Vogue Paris magazine, 2009


DePalma turns the legend of The Black Dahlia into a portrait of the Hollywood institution as both nightmare and fantasia—not dishonest sociology, but a haunting realization of all that Hollywood represents. “Hollywood will fuck you when no one else will,” says a hard-boiled police captain. His cynicism is in response to Elizabeth Short’s murder, but he could also be describing the misfortunes of his two young detectives assigned to the case, Bucky (Josh Hartnett) and Lee (Aaron Eckhart). Commodified just like movie stars, their hot and cold temperaments reflect contrasting ways of dealing with social and inner pressure—the range of moral disgust. It’s DePalma’s vision of social chaos—citizens divided against themselves—that never ends. (Johansson is uncannily photographed like Tippi Hedren in The Birds.) Source: nypress.com

Scarlett Johansson in "Summer Crossing" directorial debut

Scarlett Johansson has signed up to direct her first feature, a film adaptation of the Truman Capote’s nearly-lost novel “Summer Crossing.” Aldamisa will produce and shop the pic at Cannes. Aldamisa is also shopping Jon Favreau’s “Chef” in which Johansson just signed up to co-star.


Adaptation is based on Capote’s novel by the same name, which follows a 17-year-old Debutant who decides to pursue romance with a Jewish valet parking attendant instead of traveling through Paris during a 1945 summer heat wave in New York. Capote never published “Summer Crossing.” In fact, he trashed the manuscript altogether, and it was only salvaged after a janitor in his building fished discovered it. The pages resurfaced in a 2004 auction and was later published. Source: variety.com


Marilyn Monroe & Truman Capote dance at El Morocco in New York (1955)


Scarlett Johansson: Buxom beauty Scarlett Johansson as Marilyn Monroe seems like an obvious choice. With her blond 'do, red lips and va-va-voom curves on display, the actress channeled the Hollywood icon in a series of ad campaigns for Dolce and Gabbana in 2010. Source: nydailynews.com


"There was something exceptional about Marilyn Monroe," muses Truman Capote. "Sometimes she could be ethereal and sometimes like a waitress in a coffee shop." The pair met in 1949 and quickly became close friends. Both devotees of the capricious moment, Capote recalls how they once danced nude in Cecil Beaton's New York hotel suite while the great photographer snapped away. Truman says that the photographic proof is somewhere in one of his five homes.


When Monroe died of a drug overdose in 1962, Capote was in Spain writing In Cold Blood. "I was walking in a little Spanish town. I saw these headlines saying: 'Marilyn Monroe, Morte,' " he remembers. "I was shocked, even though you knew she was the kind of person this might happen to." Source: www.people.com

Jake Gyllenhaal and Chris Pine to join "Into the Woods" musical

Jake Gyllenhaal leaving NYC on a Private Helicopter, on May 12, 2013

"At this year’s Cannes Film Market, Meyer’s team will be pitching foreign distributors on high-profile projects including Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. On the eve of Cannes, Meyer, 44, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children, sat down with THR to talk about what’s ahead for Sierra — think Ender’s Game, the adaptation of the Orson Scott Card novel starring Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford — and why he likes working outside of the studio system." Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com


Jake Gyllenhaal and Chris Pine are in discussions to join Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep in Disney’s adaptation of the Broadway musical Into the Woods, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.


If deals close, Gyllenhaal and Pine would play their first on-screen singing roles. Sources say that Gyllenhaal and Pine would play the musical’s two princes, Cinderella’s Prince and Rapunzel’s Prince, brothers who are pompous and self-absorbed. A fall production start is being eyed. The project is expected to attract more big names. John DeLuca is producing. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com


Chris Pine -On being a misfit in high school: "Just looking at a girl felt awkward. When you feel like an oddball, it never really leaves you. Even now, I'm better around people who are uncomfortable with themselves, the misfits."


Last time he cried: "I cry all the time--at work, at the shrink's, with my lady. The Notebook killed me. Up destroyed me. Up was like the animated Amour."


Motto: "Just get in there and get dirty."
Source: blogs.villagevoice.com

This idea sounds promising, two blue-eyed hotties together and singing gracefully in a musical film - which is a very valued if risky field (Les Miserables had a great reception last year) that needs very skillful performers- connected to a talented cast. Chris Pine is a great choice, because he looks like Jake's geek twin brother.

Noirish settings: David Lynch's Alphabet, De Palma's The Black Dahlia

Fox has officially greenlit its first event series, handing out the order to Wayward Pines and tapping Matt Dillon to star in the drama from M. Night Shyamalan and Chad Hodge.


The drama, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Blake Crouch, Pines is described as a thriller in the vein of Twin Peaks.


The drama revolves around Ethan Burke (Dillon), a Secret Service agent who arrives in the bucolic town of Wayward Pines, Id., on a mission to find two missing federal agents. But instead of answers, Ethan's investigation only turns up more questions. Each step closer to the truth takes Ethan further from the life he knew, from the husband and father he was, until he must face the terrifying reality that he may never get out of Wayward Pines alive. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com


Wayward Pines isn’t the first show attempting to navigate the same treacherous road of plot twists and turns – set against the backdrop of a Noir-ish setting with supernatural overtones – as Twin Peaks did in the 1990s. Source: screenrant.com


Twin Peaks Cooper Dream: The iconic dream sequence that launched a cult TV show.


This weekend, as part of BAM's Booed at Cannes film series, they'll be showing two of David Lynch's most sublime works: Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. And although the former is a steamy and violent fairytale road movie about a couple on the outskirts of the law, and the latter, a psychologically terrifying mystery of sordid debauchery lurking beneath a placid facade, they both showcase different elements of Lynch's cinematic sensibility. His obsessions and auteurististic traits resound through both with the haunting tone he's known and loved for. Source: www.blackbookmag.com


Add one more film to the list – David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Early in Fire Walk With Me, an FBI chief (Lynch) presents two FBI agents (Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland) with a message in code. The message is, in fact, a woman dressed in red, with a matching red wig and a "sour" facial expression. She wears a blue rose on her lapel.


Blue flower imagery in Hollywood films goes at least as far back as 1946's The Blue Dahlia (directed by George Marshall from a screenplay by Raymond Chandler), the title of which was borrowed by the press to describe the most famous lust-crime of 1947, the murder of demi-prostitute Elisabeth Short, aka "The Black Dahlia."


The Black Dahlia, Brian De Palma’s fictionalized version of the Elizabeth Short murder investigation (adapted faithfully from James Ellroy’s book of the same name), is as dark a film noir as Hollywood has produced in recent years. Maybe not as dark as 1992's Fire Walk With Me, but dark and sexually perverse enough to make the recent Hollywoodland (the conspiracy film where there is no conspiracy) look like a kiddies story. Director Robert Wise once told Bright Lights that for a noir to be truly noir, it had to be shot in black and white.


The Black Dahlia is, of course, shot in color (by Obsession cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond), but black and white cinematography is skillfully woven into De Palma’s tapestry throughout. Elizabeth Short’s screen tests are black and white. So is a stag film containing clues to the victim’s murder. Source: brightlightsfilm.com


This being quintessential noir, “Black Dahlia” is sexually explicit in depicting a romantic triangle between Bucky, Kay, and Madeleine, who may or may not have known Betty Short and who may or may not be bisexual. The sexual attraction between Bucky and Madeleine is depicted in particularly steamy way in a number of scenes. As De Palma promised during production, Hilary Swank, known until now for her tough gender-bending Oscar roles (“Boys Don't Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby”) is utterly credible as a noirish femme fatale. Source: www.emanuellelevy.com


The spiritual deflowering is all Bucky's. As he watches Short's screen tests, he becomes entranced by her ghostly image, and pursues justice in hopes of reclaiming her goodness and strengthening his. Like the heroes of other obsessive necrophiliac love stories—including Laura, Vertigo and De Palma's own Body Double—Bucky works through, and also evades, his dawning sense of helplessness by falling in love with a murdered woman and figuratively trying to resurrect her. It's a doomed quest. As Bucky burrows deeper into the city's underbelly, Short's murder begins to seem a redundant postscript —the annihilation of a woman who was already dead in spirit— and a harbinger of Bucky's own journey.


Bucky will see that dead woman as long as he lives. Justice won't bring her back to life, and no matter how diligently he tries to submerge that dreadful image—to forget and heal and move on—it will remain in his memory and erupt when he least expects it. "Nothing stays buried forever," Bucky tells us early in the The Black Dahlia; by the end, he realizes just how right he was. Source: www.slantmagazine.com

Film Noir Classics IV DVD, L.A. Confidential into TV Sequel

"Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, The Film Foundation and Turner Classic Movies again partner to present the fourth collection in this series, Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics IV. These five films, all fully restored and remastered and never before released on DVD, showcase the work of directors Joseph H. Lewis, Robert Rossen, Gordon Douglas and Alfred L. Werker—all of them masters at creating taut and atmospheric visions from morally-strained hard-boiled stories. The collection also highlights the genre-defining cinematography of Burnett Guffey and George E. Diskant, and iconic performances by film noir mainstays Dick Powell, Evelyn Keyes, Lee J. Cobb, Dennis O'Keefe and Edmond O'Brien, who excelled at revealing the raw heart that beat beneath noir's tough exteriors."


Evelyn Keyes and Dick Powell on the set of "Johnny O'Clock" (1947) directed by Robert Rossen


Johnny O'Clock (Dick Powell) is a junior partner in a posh casino with Guido Marchettis (Thomas Gomez), but is senior in the eyes of Nelle (Ellen Drew)—Guido's wife and Johnny's ex. This love triangle leads to a web of complications, leaving Police Inspector Koch (Lee J. Cobb) to unravel the threads of deceit and a murdered casino employee's sister (Evelyn Keyes) to tug on Johnny's heartstrings before it's too late.



Dick Powell as Johnny O'Clock and Evelyn Keyes as Nancy Hobson share some intensely erotic moments in "Johnny O'Clock"


Applying Raymond Chandler's dictum that a good plot is an excuse for a series of exciting scenes, rookie director Robert Rossen strings together tense vignettes—brought vividly to life by cinematographer Burnett Guffey. Source: shop.tcm.com


Ella Raines in "Phantom Lady" (1944) directed by Robert Siodmak

-SF360: Who are the directors you gravitate toward and why?

Deanna Durbin in "Christmas Holiday" (1944) directed by Robert Siodmak

-Eddie Muller: Robert Siodmak is my favorite director because he, more than anyone else, understands the noir style. He’s a very seductive, suspenseful, atmospheric filmmaker. It really bugs me when people talk about noir as tough, violent pot boilers and they think it’s all like Mickey Spillane. The best noir films are spellbinding. That’s the word that comes to mind. It’s a style of filmmaking that completely complements stories about a person drawn into a situation almost against their will; they really shouldn’t go there but they can’t help themselves. The next thing you know they’re caught up in a whirlpool of sin and there’s no way out. I love when a filmmaker directs a film in exactly this way and that’s what Siodmak always did. His films have an inexorable pull—they’re not fast paced, there’s no slam-bang editing. Lynch’s films also have that quality. They draw you in and you can’t help yourself, you have the feeling that something dreadful is going to happen but you can’t stop going down that path.

-SF360: So, here’s pop quiz. Name the steamiest noir moment or scene.


-Eddie Muller: The after-shower, tic-tac-toe scene from Thieves Highway is the one stands that out for me. It was an early film I saw and I always cite it as an example of why old Hollywood movies, even with the Production Code, were more erotic than movies made today. Take Gilda: It’s the most perverted movie ever made.

-SF360: Your favorite/most lethal femme fatale?


-Eddie Muller: The women I’d travel back in time to are: Gloria Grahame, Ella Raines and Linda Darnell. Ella Raines was never really a femme fatale but I just really like her.



-SF360: How did you find your way into this niche?

-Muller: I like the films and particularly like that period of American history because I think it’s the time—mid-20th century, the span from victory in WW2 to the Kennedy assassination—when America lost its innocence. We were kings of the world because we saved the world and then when Kennedy was assassinated, it was if we lost our way and there was something horrible and corrupt at the center of our society. How that happened and how it’s reflected in the popular art of the time has always been interesting to me. Source: www.sf360.org


"The truth about Elizabeth Short is that she was a lost individual. She involved herself with a number of men, using their generosity for free dinners and money. The murder unfortunately was also a precursor to the decline of Los Angeles itself. The Black Dahlia murder is a symbol of change from what was once a young and innocent Los Angeles to a dark and gloomy Hollywood. The crime rate since World War II has increased in Los Angeles, and areas that were once considered middle-class neighborhoods have turned into rundown areas over a period of 20 years."


"What I have learned in the end is that the murder is not only a loss of a young life, it is also a loss of old-fashioned Hollywood. In the following years, race riots, immigration and civil rights have changed Los Angeles to what it is today; leaving all what was of 'Hollywoodland' behind, and bringing with it the unsolved case from a time that is gone but not forgotten." Source: dailybruin.com


In this respect, "The Black Dahlia" is one of De Palma’s most unflattering mirrors, its entirely uncompromised mise en scène in every way the stylistic equal of James Ellroy’s source novel. I had as much trouble getting into Ellroy’s fictionalization of the Elizabeth Short murder mystery until I recognized that he is, in part, a parodist, using hard-boiled, floridly macho prose to get at deeper psychological truths about human nature. He wields a pen in much the same way De Palma does a camera—to create, for both men, is to bear witness with a fervor approaching, if not attaining, the religious.


Their shared vessel is the young warrants detective Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert, a model of first-person arrogance in the novel, cast as something of an androgynous specter in De Palma’s adaptation. Embodied by a never-better Josh Hartnett, Bleichert wanders through a falsified period landscape, recalling his loss of innocence (or acknowledging his always-present corruption) through a precisely employed voiceover that casts each and every event (save for the film’s brilliantly nonredemptive final sequence) within the deceptive realm of memory. Source: www.reverseshot.com


Within 90 seconds of taking the stage, the author of "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia" had referenced sex, drugs and physical anatomy, a warm-up for the searing commentary on liberals and hipsters that was to follow. It was a refreshingly unabashed articulation of a unique worldview that has produced one of the most distinctive voices on the local literary scene. In other words, Ellroy was a perfect fit for the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series, some of the best programming currently taking place on the Glendale campus. Source: articles.glendalenewspress.com


James Ellroy’s 1990s novel L.A. Confidential was turned into an acclaimed feature starring Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger and produced by Regency. Now Ellroy and New Regency are shopping an L.A. Confidential sequel targeted for the small screen, Deadline said. Ellroy wrote the project on spec as a TV drama series, which is being pitched to broadcast and cable networks as well as emerging distribution platforms, with multiple outlets interested. The project is reportedly eyeing a straight-to-series commitment.


The sequel continues the themes and stories from L.A. Confidential, a murder mystery which examined the intersection of organized crime, police corruption, celebrity and tabloid journalism in 1950s Los Angeles.


The 1997 film, co-written and directed by Curtis Hanson, earned nine Oscar nominations, winning two awards, for best screenplay and best supporting actress (Basinger). The L.A. Confidential sequel is one of the first major projects to come out of the TV division of New Regency, which was re-started last year with the hire of Syfy’s Andrew Plotkin. It combines the company’s strategy of mining its movie library for TV series adaptations and bringing in new material.


Meanwhile, Ellroy just sold another LA-set period drama. Based on Ellroy’s 2012 novella Shakedown, the project, which has been set up at FX as a pitch, is set in the tabloid world and underbelly of Los Angeles circa the late 1950s. Source: www.panarmenian.net