If you're both 1) desperate for some distraction from the holiday hubbub and 2) eager to get a leg up on the rest of your office for the annual Oscar pool, here's a way to kill two birds with one stone. Over thirty screenplays for some of 2013's top films have just been made available,…
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Left to his own devices Lee Daniels makes films that are eccentric and sometimes just way the hell out there. (The Paperboy) But he has called his newest film, The Butler, "a big compromise" and explained that the film might be "the closest I will come to as a work-for-hire." Does that mean that, on the…
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It took a couple of years after Precious for director Lee Daniels to get cameras rolling on his follow-up, the lurid Southern melodrama The Paperboy, but he's barely even taking a breather before heading into his next picture. Even as The Paperboy gears up for its theatrical run, Daniels has already started shooting The Butler with…
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Precious director Lee Daniels is putting together The Butler, and he's handing Robin Williams a razor before signing him on to the film. Williams is now set to play former President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the movie, which traces the true story of Eugene Allen, who served in the White House for three decades, through…
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Even as Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious, The Paperboy, makes its debut at Cannes this week, the filmmaker's wasting no time assembling a stellar cast for his next project, The Butler. The talented Forest Whitaker leads the picture as Eugene Allen, the late White House butler who served under eight different presidents from 1952 through 1986,…
Read MoreBriefly: For anyone who doubted, Lee Daniels just proved that he has a sense of humor, perhaps even an impish sense of provocation. The director of Precious and the upcoming film The Paperboy is assembling The Butler, about Eugene Allen, a White House butler who served presidents from Harry Truman in 1952 to Ronald Reagan…
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A couple years ago, Precious director Lee Daniels went back and forth on the idea of filming the life of longtime White House servant Eugene Allen for the movie The Butler, or making a civil rights drama called Selma. In the end, he made neither, choosing instead to shoot The Paperboy with Zac Efron, John…
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In the months that followed the release and general success of Lee Daniels' film Precious, the director considered two follow-ups. One was Selma, a civil-rights drama that would have recreated the relationship between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson. The other was The Butler, about a man named Eugene Allen, who was…
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The last time we had a check-in on Selma, the civil rights picture director Lee Daniels spent much of 2010 preparing to make, financing was an issue. The director had a script and a cast (Hugh Jackman, Liam Neeson, David Oyelowo, Robert De Niro, Cedric the Entertainer) but money was a problem. Then he was…
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Precious director Lee Daniels has assembled quite a cast for civil rights film Selma, but the film is still looking for financing, and now the director has made a deal with Sony to rewrite and direct The Butler, based on the story of Eugene Allen, who was a servant in the White House through eight…
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