"I'm going to make the movie regardless of whether you want to or not," Clint Eastwood told the suits at Warner Bros., when they balked at financing "Million Dollar Baby." They'd read the screenplay, Eastwood recalls, and they said "we…
Hilary Swank will quite possibly win the Oscar as best actress this year, for a role in a movie nobody had heard of two weeks ago. The movie is Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby," which wasn't in any of those…
LOS ANGELES -- Martin Scorsese is not a creature of the sound bite. In an age when directors and stars are trained by their publicists to stay on message and repeat glowing mantras about their movies, Scorsese is all over…
Does anyone ever really think about the director of an opera? I'm not talking about opera professionals or music critics, who know all about such things. I'm thinking of ordinary ticketholders. We think about the singers above all, and then,…
Oliver Stone seems at the end of his rope, but then he always seems at the end of his rope. Here is a man who needs sleep. He has flown in from Paris, he's jet-lagged, he's talking in that rapid-fire…
Alfred Kinsey has been dead for 48 years, and he still makes people mad. "Kinsey," a movie inspired by the life of the sex researcher, hasn't even opened, and here is an AP story about "indignant conservative groups" who think…
Christopher Reeve, who became famous playing a character who could fly around the world, and as a man whose wheelchair did not limit his flights of idealism, died Sunday. He was 52. In the years since he was paralyzed in…
Hank Oettinger, who arguably wrote more letters to more editors than anyone else in Chicago history, is dead at 92. Mr. Oettinger died in his sleep Tuesday morning, Oct. 5, of natural causes, according to his friends Tobin Mitchell and…
Rodney Dangerfield, who died on Tuesday at 82, had many reincarnations as a comedian, not hitting his stride until his 40s. In 1983, Ebert visited the set of his movie "Easy Money" (1983).
Among Janet Leigh's last interviews was one she gave in July to the Sun-Times' Miriam Di Nunzio about the DVD release of "The Manchurian Candidate." Some excerpts: On working with directors John Frankenheimer, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles: "They were all…
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