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Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is the latest turn in a long motion picture tradition of pilfering FBI case files for screen scenarios. Originally, Hollywood coveted the validation of the bureau (“based on actual FBI case histories!”) and the personal imprimatur of its lord high ruler, J. Edgar Hoover (who in 1945 actually read life insurance commercials for NBC radio’s This Is Your FBI). Today, it often takes cues without the official stamp of the FBI shield. Either way, the two American institutions have enjoyed a profitable relationship.

Created in 1908 within the Department of Justice as the Bureau of Investigation and formally branded with the trademark initials in 1935, the FBI grew up during the first wave of electronic age media and took full advantage of the coincidence. Hollywood cinema (newsreels, shorts, and feature films), radio crime shows, comic strips and television series...

Gangster icons aren’t always determined by top billing. Sometimes it’s decided by a flip of a coin. Director Howard Hawks’ 1932 gangster classic Scarface recently celebrated its 90th anniversary. Producer Howard Hughes was so committed to presenting a realistic depiction of mob violence that the film pushed the Motion Picture Production Code to its limit. Paul Muni puts in a gritty, animalistic performance in the title role of Antonio “Tony” Carmonte, modeled after Al Capone, but the actor with the gangland bona fides was the co-star, George Raft.

Hired for his dark and menacing presence, Raft doesn’t have many lines in Scarface. To give the inexperienced actor something to do, Hawks directed him to flip a nickel. Raft practiced the toss to perfection, setting the film up for one of the most memorable mob movie moments: a coin rolling across a floor to a dead stop.

Raft would...

Not considered a seminal year in Hollywood history, 1984 delivered an amazing number of iconic American films. Here’s a sampling of movies that still resonate today: “Beverly Hills Cop,” “The Karate Kid,” “Footloose,” “Purple Rain,” “The Terminator,” “Scarface,” “Romancing the Stone,” “Police Academy,” “This Is Spinal Tap,” “Stop Making Sense,” “Stranger Than Paradise,” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Four 1984 releases ended up with domestic grosses above $400 million (adjusted to 2020 values). Three led the weekend that year. The top two, “Ghostbusters” and “Gremlins,” in an unusual event, opened in wide release on the same day.

The third-ranked film, in its third week and after two weeks in the top spot, was “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” Fourth in its second week was “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.” “The Karate Kid” opened two weeks later. Five of 1984’s eight biggest hits opened within less than a month.

Mother of mercy, did the movies mark the beginning of Rico? The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was named after the character Rico Bandello in what is largely considered to be the first gangster movie, Little Caesar. While Edward G. Robinson’s Rico wasn’t specifically Al Capone in that film, the real-life gangster’s signature cigar fumes are all over it. Josh Trank replaced the Cuban Corona with a carrot in the recent Vertical Entertainment film Capone, which stars Tom Hardy as the title character in his twilight years, suffering from a premature burial. The aging mobster’s memories were buried by the syphilis microbe, and along with it went the clues to his buried treasure.

That speculative biopic also depicts Capone as a film aficionado. He sings along with Bert Lahr’s incomparable “If I Were King of the Forest,” from The Wizard of Oz, and educates...

Mexican-born writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer has been tapped to rewrite Universal Pictures’ new, original take of “Scarface,” TheWrap has exclusively learned. Additionally, “Training Day” director Antoine Fuqua, who previously left the film, has returned.

Previous drafts of the film were written by white, American writers David Ayer, Jonathan Herman and Joel Coen & Ethan Coen — which could have opened up “Scarface” to charges of cultural insensitivity. The new film will reimagine the the 1932 “Scarface” — and the 1983 Brian DePalma version, which starred Al Pacino as Cuban refugee Tony Montana — as the story of a Mexican drug lord in Los...

Containing multitudes is a time-honored cinematic tradition.

Sure, featuring a single actor as more than one character in your movie smells a bit like a gimmick—but at the end of the day, it’s an efficient and often effective means of showcasing the versatility of a performer. And that can hardly be faulted. We caught a whiff of it with Split this year, though McAvoy might be disqualified for being a Legion of One rather than a cast with a shared face. Personally, I had no idea the trend cast such a wide-reaching historical net — I’d stupidly assumed it was something made possible by the advent of modern makeup and digital tech. Again, stupidly.

Be it gimmick or something more nuanced (or both!) — it’s particularly fascinating that it has such a long standing history as a marketing device. Film quality aside, the main draw is often the performative tour-de-force itself. Some...

On this day in history as it relates to the movies...

1859 Billy the Kid, future legendary outlaw, is born. He's been played in movies and TV by actors like Buster Crabbe, Hugh O'Brian, Paul Newman, Clu Galager, Val Kilmer, and perhaps most famously by Kris Kristofferson, BAFTA nominated for Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973)

1887 Boris Karloff, villainous movie icon (Frankenstein, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Scarface, etcetera) is born

1888 Harpo Marx is born...

I’ve always been fascinated by the duality of Pre-Code cinema, which is talked up in classic film circles as a sin-fueled dungeon of excess, but in most cases simply uses outlandish scenarios to moralistic ends. Baby Face might be about a woman sleeping her way to the top of society, but Barbara Stanwyck still has to realize love is more important than all the riches she’s accrued. Scarface might glorify violence, but Paul Muni will still get his in the end. Indulgence and retreat; enjoy the highs, but shape up or be doomed. Similarly, in the 1970s, after the Motion Picture Production Code was shattered and a wave of sex-fueled odysseys came rushing to the screens, they tended to strike out familiar territory, using their exploitative qualities to reinforce the status quo. So it is with The Swinging Cheerleaders. Jack Hill’s 1974 cheapo gets high on its topless women and under-the-table groping,...

New Original Programming:

“Meet the Donors” (8/1)

“Dios, Inc.” - Season 1 Finale (8/5)

“Hitchcock/Truffaut” (8/8)

“Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the La Rams” (8/10)

“El Negocio” - Season 3 Premiere (8/12)

IndieWire Pick: “The Night Of” (Series Finale) (8/28)

HBO’s well-received limited series “The Night Of” will wrap up its eight-part whodunnit in late August. Steve Zaillian’s gritty drama, which examines a man’s fate after he wakes up charged with the murder of a relative stranger, debuted to rave reviews from critics and audiences. IndieWire’s Ben Travers writes, “By actively engaging on personal and political levels, Zaillian sucks the viewer into a nightmare scenario wholly dependent on two verdicts: first, whether or not Naz is found guilty, but also if he really did it.” Here’s hoping the series can maintain its slow burn thrills all the way to the end.

Read More: Review: ‘The Night Of’ ‘Serial’-izes ‘Law & Order,...

Do you enjoy special-effects laden blockbusters? How about gritty crime dramas? Or biting comedies? The New Hollywood movement helped to make all of these possible in mainstream cinema.

New Hollywood is less a trend about the kinds of films that were produced and more about the people making them. The New Hollywood movement was about a new generation of filmmakers who came of age in the 60’s and went on to define filmmaking in the 70’s. These are filmmakers who went against tradition to push film to new heights and explore new genres and ideas. New Hollywood is the passing of the torch from the classic era of filmmaking to the modern era. It showed us both how great intimate character-focused dramas could be, but it also expanded the possibilities of what film could be, giving birth to the blockbuster. The New Hollywood movement is the foundation upon which current cinema is based.

A review of tonight's "Boardwalk Empire" coming up just as soon as the room is as occupied as a room can get... "What sense that make? We headed to different places." -Chalky There's always been this pattern with each season of "Boardwalk Empire." You get midway through any year of this show, and you start wondering exactly where these stories are going, why the writers are spending so much time on characters who seem like dead ends, when Richard Harrow's going to take out his gun collection, etc. In those previous years, all the seeming randomness and narrative throat-clearing inevitably led to a riveting final three or four episodes that inevitably made you realize that almost all of what seemed like a waste of time was actually really important to the great conclusion. With its shorter length, large amount of story ground to cover, plus the decision to spend time on Nucky's origin story,...

Tod Browning’s “Freaks”

Before R-ratings, anti-heroes and gratuitous violence and nudity in mainstream Hollywood movies, there was the Hays Code. As a form of self-policing the industry, virtually every movie released up until 1968 needed that stamp of approval if it wanted distribution. And while it helped produce all of Old Hollywood’s true classics for several decades, it often included ridiculous rulings like not being able to show or flush a toilet on screen, not allowing married couples to be shown sleeping in the same bad or always making sure criminals, even protagonists of the movie, got punished in the end.

But before the Hays Code was nothing, and it was a gloriously weird, scandalous time for the movies. Certain Hollywood films in the early ’30s as “talkies” were rapidly taking hold have since been labeled “Pre-Code” films that never received Hollywood’s stamp of approval.

Every Friday in September,...

Hollywood got away with a hell of a lot before the Production Code, and Turner Classic Movies is offering a weekly taste of the bounty. Alec Baldwin and TCM's Robert Osborne will introduce 24 hours of pre-Code sex, drugs, profanity, nudity and bad behavior every Friday in September. TCM will highlight the freewheeling early careers of Barbara Stanwyck, Mae West, Jean Harlow, Warren William, James Cagney and more who starred in films where the bad guy sometimes won, and where the fallen heroine didn't need, or even want, to be saved. Classics on the docket include "Baby Face," "Footlight Parade," "Freaks," "Trouble in Paradise," "The Story of Temple Drake" and "Scarface" -- all wildly licentious for the time. Without censorship, during the 20s and early 30s sound boom, Hollywood did not sanitize sex, drug use, abortion, prostitution and extreme violence. Here's a look at the Code, which has some whacky do-nots.

I must have been about 12 years old when I first saw Tarzan and His Mate. I loved the Tarzan movies. Tarzan was the undisputed King of the Jungle and was the greatest, Cheetah was man’s best friend, Boy was annoying, and Jane was the Queen of the Jungle and a young male’s introduction to the allure of the female. The uncensored version, with a naked Jane silhouetted while changing clothes in a backlit tent and the spectacular underwater ballet scene would have been a revelation to me; Tarzan and Jane are frolicking in their favorite swimming hole, Tarzan in his usual loincloth and Jane naked – not naked from the waste up, or presumed naked as they hid her behind some lake flora or rocks – Jane was naked.

Madam Satan

Most film fans knowledge of Pre-Code Hollywood movies doesn’t go much further than King Kong, Frankenstein, and a few other titles.

Little Caesar (1931) Director: Mervyn LeRoy Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Glenda Farrell, Sidney Blackmer, William Collier Jr., Ralph Ince, Stanley Fields, George E. Stone, Thomas E. Jackson Screenplay: Francis Edward Faragoh, Robert N. Lee; from a novel by W.R. Burnett Oscar Movies Edward G. Robinson, Little Caesar Little Caesar is a good example of a film that is historically important, but that has dated very poorly. Tony Gaudio's camera work is mediocre, Warner Bros. musical director Erno Rapee's spare soundtrack is garbled, and the acting is for the most part wooden. Even Edward G. Robinson, who became a star in this role, is good — but hardly great. What makes Little Caesar's pedestrianism all the more amazing is that just a few months later James Cagney would burst onto the screen with The Public Enemy, a film that holds up far better cinematically — both technically and aesthetically.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I loved Steven Spielberg. I could argue that “Jaws” figures as one of the great “programmers” (or genre movies) of all time, up with, say, Paul Muni’s original “Scarface,” from 1932, 1941’s “The Maltese Falcon” or the ‘80s “Top Gun”,entertainment so pure that it transcends its genre. Similarly, in the ‘80s when I was writing about movies for a living, I put “Raiders of the Lost Ark” up with John Huston’s “Treasure of Sierra Madre” as the best action films of all time: “Badges, we don’t need no...

And we’re back. After an August bereft of interesting new releases on Netflix Instant Watch (Tangled and The Expendables were the only notable titles), it’s time to get back into the swing of things with a great set of new movies available to stream beginning September 1st.

New to Netflix Streaming On Thursday September 1st: Thunderball (PG | 1965)

Flickchart Ranking: #1070

Times Ranked: 33647

Win Percentage: 35%

How Many Top-20′s: 39 Users

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Other James Bond Movies available to stream on Thursday include:

You Only Live Twice (1967 – Sean Connery)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969 – George Lazenby)

Diamonds are Forever (1971 – Sean Connery)

Live and Let Die (1973 – Roger Moore)

The Man with the Golden Gun (1975 – Roger Moore) – My personal favorite

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977 – Roger Moore)

Moonraker (1979 – Roger Moore)

For Your Eyes Only (1981 – Roger Moore)

Never Say Never Again (1983 – Sean Connery)

Octopussy (1983 – Roger Moore)

A View to a Kill (1985 – Roger Moore)

The Living Daylights...

Ann Dvorak, Paul Muni, Dr. Socrates Ann Dvorak Pt.3: Scarface, Warner Bros. Leading Lady, But Never a Star Ann Dvorak played opposite most big names at Warner Bros. in the 1930s. In addition to the aforementioned Joan Blondell and Bette Davis, there were Warren William, Paul Muni, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., James Cagney, Dick Powell, Pat O'Brien, and Richard Barthelmess, among others. How did she get along with her leading men? Was she easy to work with? As far as I can tell, Ann was very easy to work with. I got the chance to speak with both Jane Wyatt and Hugh O'Brian, who made movies with Ann, and while neither one had much to say, the phrase they both used to describe her was "very professional." According to Warners' production logs, she was always on time and for the most part did not miss work. Despite the headaches she...

Ann Dvorak Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel – Introduction Inevitably, my first question is, Why Ann Dvorak? I've definitely been asked that more than once! I rented Three on a Match around 1995 and was blown away by Ann Dvorak in it. She projected so much nervous raw energy, and even though the film was made during the pre-Code era I was still caught off guard by how edgy her performance was. I subsequently watched Scarface and G Men, not realizing Ann was in either one, and was impressed enough to try to find out more about her. I soon realized that no writer had really delved deep into her life or career, and that most of her films were not readily available. I also realized that since she was relatively obscure, I could afford to collect vintage posters from her films, even though I was a starving college student at the time.

Ann Dvorak The name Ann Dvorak wouldn't ring even a faint bell for most people around at the beginning of the 21st century. Most people, I said — but definitely not everyone. [Ann Dvorak Movie Schedule on Turner Classic Movies.] A while back, author James Robert Parish heard a loud gong when I told him during lunch at a West Hollywood restaurant that I had been working on a q&a with collector-turned-biographer Christina Rice (right), who has been writing Ann Dvorak's life story. "I love Ann Dvorak! I still remember her in I Was an American Spy, when the Japanese villains stick a hose down her throat. I never forgot that!" I haven't watched I Was an American Spy (it will be on TCM at 11 p.m. tonight), but I remember being impressed by Ann Dvorak's work in Mervyn LeRoy's hard-hitting 1932 melodrama Three on a Match, in which she plays a beautiful woman whose life is destroyed by ambition,...

“Horrible Bosses” micromanages its way into theaters today, and – with a comedic lineup boasting Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, it goes without saying that audiences will be punching tickets to witness their chemistry alone.

The black comedy centers upon three friends, Nick Hendricks (Bateman), Dale Arbus (Day), and Kurt Buckman (Sudeikis), whose overbearing bosses Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey), Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston) and Bobby Pellitt (Colin Farrell) push them to the point of postal. The pals hatch a plan to murder their evil paycheck-signing overlords, with disastrously hilarious results.

We got to wondering: are the film’s over-the-top antagonists – Farrell’s drug-addicted chemical company manager, Aniston’s sexually inappropriate dentist and Spacey’s weasely promotion-stealing executive – among good company in real life? So we talked to five formerly disgruntled victims of horrible bosses, and the answer is an enthusiastically resounding: yes!

“When I told my boss I had...

My DVD collection contains some oddities, to say the least. I have stuff ranging from all of the seasons of Due South to the most complete collection of Snoopy cartoons I can amalgamate given current releases (which is pretty darn shockingly complete, if I may say so myself). So it’s honestly not a surprise to find some strange or obscure movies in there.

I recently ordered a copy of the movie Groupie and watched it over the weekend. I’m going to have to admit that the main reason that I bought the movie is because it’s got Hal Ozsan in it. Since he is one of the actors I currently really dig, it was kind of a no brainer when I realized that it would be released on June 14th and it was relatively inexpensive.

I’m also going to admit that I’m pretty easily entertained.

Josh gets a little superstitious and a little bit bawdy when he puts Three on a Match.

The largely forgotten Ann Dvorak sizzles in this snappy 63 minute pre-code Warner Bros. melange of booze, drugs and gambling. Scarface star Dvorak still has a cult following, which has gotten a modern boost from recent dvd releases of her films by Warner Archive. As a result, Turner Classic Movies has scheduled a Summer Under the Stars 24 hour tribute, coming up on August 24.

Click here to watch the trailer, then follow on for a little bonus linkage.

First of all, this is the second mention of The Hollywood Production Code (aka The Hays Code). You should really know all about that ifyou’re here, but, if you don’t, here’s a mighty nice primer from a few years back.

Second of all, check out this website devoted to all things Anne Dvorak, the...

2 and 3 plus 10 add up to a Tfh Milestone: our 600th Trailer!

Find out what these numbers mean in this week’s preview!

On Monday, June 20th, Allan Arkush rushes back after spending Two Weeks in Another Town

Director Vincente Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas reunited for this operatic non-sequel followup to their caustic 1952 Hollywood saga The Bad and the Beautiful, now set ten years later in the La Dolce Vita movie world of Rome and based on a novel by Irwin Shaw. Some claim its protagonists are thinly veiled representations of Tyrone Power, Linda Christian and Darryl Zanuck. Extensively recut by the studio, it’s still a deliriousfantasy about Eternal City filmmaking with some memorable sequences and a terrific cast.

On Wednesday, June 22nd, Josh Olson puts 3 On a Match.

The largely forgotten Ann Dvorak sizzles in this snappy 63 minute pre-code Warner Bros. melange of booze, drugs and gambling. Scarface...

Above: Publicity still from John Parker's Dementia (1955).

Rep houses in San Francisco, like those in most American cities, are struggling to stay open. But for something like thirty nights a year, the clouds lift and big crowds materialize for films of the past: call it the noir exception. To be sure, one needn’t actually attend the Film Noir Foundation’s annual Noir City festival at the Castro or Elliot Lavine’s grittier programs at the Roxie to know that the generic fantasy of film noir (style, sex and violence washed together) still holds powerful allure. You could hardly miss the bus stop advert for Rockstar Games’ latest blockbuster, L.A. Noire, outside the Roxie during Lavine’s latest marathon, “I Wake Up Dreaming: The Legendary and the Lost”. For those of us still invested in the non-interactive cinema experience, however, the popularity of these series is a remarkable if curious thing.

Save the date for May’s Third Thursday screening of Fresh at 7:30 p.m. There will be a pre-film Farmers Market reception starting at 6:30. The screening will begin at 7:30 with a discussion immediately following film. The event will be held at Newman University in the Dugan Library and Campus Center (Dugan-Gorges Conference Center). Tickets are $10 at the door, $8 for students and seniors.

Fresh celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet. Among several main characters, the film features urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, the recipient of MacArthur’s 2008 Genius Award; sustainable farmer and entrepreneur,...

You just can’t keep a good serial killer down, especially when he only exists in our imaginations. Freddy Krueger returns once again this Friday, April 30, but this time without Robert Englund. Jackie Earle Haley slips into the scar makeup and knife-fingered glove this time around, hoping to give new life to an old favorite. Haley has already proven himself is short time to be one of this generation’s great character actors, with a knack for the dark and creepy side of the craft. In light of the new Nightmare On Elm Street film, We Are Movie Geeks has compiled our Top Ten List of the Best Creepy Character Actors.

Honorable Mention: Rondo Hatton

Of all the actors on this list, none has had a more tragic personal story as Rondo Hatton. As a young man Hatton was diagnosed with a rare pituitary disorder known as acromegalia (the studios...

First off I need to apologize for the tardiness of this entry. I was infected with the swine pandemic and was unable to do anything but utter “Bbbbraaaiiinsssss…” feebly from my bed. Now I’m up and about again, so here we go.

One of the first things to do when making your movie is figure out who your main character is going to be. Now, you may pick your plot first and then figure what kind of protagonist you want or you may pick your characters and write about what they do – it all depends on your style of writing. In either case, understanding your protagonist(s) is very important since these are the people whom the plot revolves around, who we will come to know and love and who we will follow for the next 120 minutes. They will be our tour guides through your movie so you have...

Actor Gabriel Byrne.

Gabriel Byrne: Talk To Me

By

Alex Simon

Editor's Note: The following article appears in the April issue of Venice Magazine.

Gabriel Byrne was born in Dublin May 12, 1950, the eldest of six children. After schooling under the stern tutelage of The Christian Brothers and five years in Catholic seminary, Byrne attended University College in Dublin, where he studied linguistics and archeology, as well as honing his love of soccer, playing with the renowned Stella Maris Football Club.

Byrne discovered acting late compared to most of his peers, spending his 20s working in a variety of professions including schoolteacher, where his students inadvertently helped him discover his true calling (see below for more details). Since then, he has starred in over 45 films for some of cinema's finest contemporary directors both in the Us and Europe (John Boorman, Costa Gavras, Michael Mann, Ken Loach, David Cronenberg, and the Coen Brothers,...