Born Jan. 3, 1905, in Los Angeles' Chinatown, Wong played the lead role in the first Technicolor feature, The Toll of the Sea, in 1922, when she was just 17. By 19 she was intriguing against the movies' top action star, Douglas Fairbanks, in his super-production The Thief of Bagdad. At 23 she went to Europe, where she starred in a half-dozen A pictures - including her best one, E.A. Dupont's Piccadilly - and, when sound films arrived, performing roles in three languages: English, German and French.

York Honored as the IPA's 2009 Mary Pickford Award Winner. Los Angeles, CA, October 14, 2009 --The International Press Academy today announced that actor Michael York will receive the 2009Mary Pickford Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Entertainment Industry at this year's 14th Annual Satellite Awards™ on Sunday, December 20, 2009 in Los Angeles, CA.

Spanning 45 years in entertainment, Michael York's career began on stage in his native England with the National Youth Theatre. After graduating from Oxford University, he joined Laurence Olivier's National Theatre in 1965 and made his film debut the following year in Franco "Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew" with legendary screen couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. He also appeared as Tybalt in the Zeffirelli remake of "Romeo and Juliet".

FOX STORY #4702: SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND FAMILY (Fox News, US 1922) James Seebach; New York, 24.6.1922; Fox Movietone News Collection, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

A PERSONAL GLANCE AT W.C. FIELDS

A Personal glance at W.C.Fields

Although Dr. Harriet FIELDS never got a chance to call the stage, silent film and talkies comic legend 'Grandpa' (he died shortly before she was born), as the only granddaughter of the star, she feels strongly about familiarising the world with the true persona of the artist.

Present at this 2008 edition of the Pordenone Giornate de Cinema Muto, which is showing a complete retro of Field's silent films, Dr. Fields,with a doctorate in Community Health and Nursing, Graduate of Columbia University and residing in Washington D.C., sees her mission in presenting her grandfather's work worldwide as two-fold :

Jean Darling, child prodigy of the silent film era, now a sprightly 84, is present as Guest of Honour at this year's Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone to introduce the restored copy of OUR GANG films she starred in during the '20s. As a child star, her colleagues included Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Jean Harlow, Hal Raoch, Fatty Arbuckle, Marion Davies, Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. She is one of the few remaining actors of the silent film period left to witness the scene as she did in her autobiography a peek in the past, published in 1995.

Abel Gance's J'Accuse (1919), a politically an d stylistically daring anti-war drama produced while the trench warfare of World War I was still grinding up soldiers on both sides of the battle, opens with the title spelled out by the bodies of soldiers striding into formation, like a marching band at a half-time show. Then they collapse, as if dead, to startling effect. Appropriating the cry leveled by Emile Zola during the Dreyfus affair, Gance levels his accusations at war itself.

The film Der Golem is a classic film – doubly so.

First, it has long nestled comfortably within the list of titles that make up the German Expressionist movement of the 1920s. Teachers of survey history courses are more likely to show Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, but a serious enthusiast will make a point of seeing Der Golem as well.

From the start, reviewers recognized Der Golem as Expressionist. In 1921 the New York Times' critic wrote, "Resembling somewhat the curious constructions of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, the settings may be called expressionistic, but to the common man they are best described as expressive, for it is their eloquence that characterizes them." (Spellbound in Darkness, p. 362) In 1930, Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now, the most ambitious world history of cinema in English to date, appeared. Highly influential in establishing the canon of classics, Rotha adored Weimar cinema, including Der Golem.

Francesca Bertini was one of the most successful silent film divas of Italy. Born 1892, she played in films as a child in Naples and in Rome.

Nicholas Eliopoulos – Producer/Director/Editor "Director's Statement" on Mary Pickford :

Like most of us, I never got to meet Mary Pickford. I did have the privilege of knowing and interviewing her late husband Buddy Rogers. Buddy starred in the first motion picture to ever win a "Best Picture" Oscar…William Wellman's 1927 Silent Classic Wings.

True-blue British actor, Michael York has arrived in Pordenone, Northern Italy, with his wife Pat, to introduce Mary Pickford, the Muse, a new comprehensive documentary on the silent film diva, directed by Nicholas Eliopoulos.

Hollywood Elite turns out for premiere of documentary Mary Pickford, Muse of the Movies which pays tribute to the legendary film star.

Watch the gala here – Documentary Honors Film Legend Mary Pickford

Alright! Back to basics! The basis of our physical life as humans, it seems, is to grow through experience or to just simply die without sensorial pleasures and conversely, discomforts, whether plainly in the mind or purely in the body. All events in one's life are present in the moment to be experienced and it is up to the perceiver to create, learn, and grow from these experiences. We exist as sponges to any and all conscious or unconscious experience through all of our senses; these are things that cannot be denied simply because all the tools we have to detect reality are channeled through our vehicle in this outer world filtered through the mind. We believe things to exist, therefore we experience them as closely as possible, or not. The philosophical flipside to that coin is that we experience things firstly, and then determine their reality. Either way, we must experience something, no?

"Why does one constantly mimic herself in front of the lens all the time? In any case, her image will appear as someone else. Photograph seems like a mirror with memory. What happens if herself never coincides with her image…"

Presented in part at the Turkish Pavilion reception at the Cannes Film Festival, LOST SONGS OF ANATOLIA, on a background of clips of peasant musicians from Eastern Turkey featured a modern rock quartet accompanying beautiful authentic shots taken on the spot.

I suppose an elaboration on the topics of the last few blog entries I've written for the precious few readers I have out there is long overdue and in order. So here it is… Firstly, this blog is aptly titled as such because being a long-winded story-telling human who happens to be an actor, I naturally ramble on just enough of things I've studied, learned, and/or have experienced personally.

The Million Yen Girl shown at Udine Far East Festival involves a 21 year old student who heads for the road after experiencing disappointment with her family and disillusionment with the difficulty of earning a living in Tokyo. Wanting to become independent, she co-rents an apartment with a total stranger who throws out a kitten she adopted, after which she tosses all his owning out the window and gets the book for alienation of private property. After a short term in jail, her welcome home is cold and she can count on no support from her family or friends, neither moral nor financial.

In an extraordinary series of videos made for the Museum of the Moving Image, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz discusses the filmmakers, authors and even comic books that have shaped the films of Wes Anderson. This is surely one of the most imitated filmmakers of the 21-st Century, so it's fascinating to see where he gets his inspiration from.

Academy-Award Winner For Best Foreign Film 2009

It was full house yesterday at the 1200-seater Teatro Giovanni Theatre in Udine for the European premiere of Departures.

Children of the Amazon follows Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol as she travels a modern highway deep into the Amazon in search of the Indigenous Surui and Negarote children she photographed fifteen years ago. Part road movie, part time travel, her jour- ney tells the story of what happened to life in the largest forest on Earth when a road was built straight through its heart.

Yatterman(Yattaman) from the celebrated cartoon, comes the live action film, of the greatest pop-robot adventure in the world!

…a film already destined to become a cult…

The European Premiere of the highly anticipated blockbuster, directed by the legendary Miike Takashi, will close the eleventh edition of Far East Film.

Brought to you by the creative minds behind Pencil Fighting: The Life and Times of Team Balderdash, the 20-minute short Inventing Kin is a dramedy about missed opportunities and life's second chances. It's close in spirit to Zach Braff's Garden State, which was also about a lost soul returning home to make peace with the past. This new film lacks the broad characterizations that made Pencil Fighting so memorable, but it displays some of the quirkiness that sets the films of Fro Rojas apart. (Full disclosure: Rojas and I both went to Miami International University of Art & Design, where we made a film together.)

We've all heard our female friends and family members say that famous saying: "A good man is hard to find!" Well how about this take on that saying: "A good Spanish movie is hard to find!!!" Well my dear Cinebloggers, I got news for you: In the process of finding A Good Movie, we found A Good Man (Un Buen Hombre)!

Gibara, Cuba

Over a Hundred Films Will Compete at the International Non-Budget Movie Festival. As always, the Festival will be held at the small, beautiful northeastern city of Gibara.

The Late Humberto Solas, Founder & Creator Humberto Solás. Photo Archive. Mildrey Ponce.

Well, not quite. Stuart Townsend's Battle in Seattle, about the protests at the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference, grossed well under $1 million at the box office when it was released in a handful of theaters last fall. The DVD came out on March 10. I usually have trouble getting new releases on Netflix because the wait list is so long, but I had so such problem when I Netflixed Battle in Seattle. Interest in this movie seems to range from lukewarm to nil.

Twilight. Seems like it's everywhere these days. It's at the store when I go buy groceries, glossy magazines with Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson staring hungrily at each other. It's on airplanes, rows and rows of noses stuck in books, the same cover showing one bright-red apple and two snow-white hands. It's on T-shirts, necklaces and billboards. It's at the mall. It seems to have taken over Hot Topic. You know, that store that used to be cool?

This is a genuine phenomenon. I won't attempt to answer why. For one thing, I haven't read the books (Stephanie Meyer has written four of them). Secondly, I think that question has already been answered, by none other than Stephen King (who's not a fan, by the way): "People are attracted by the stories, by the pace, and in the case of Stephenie Meyers, it's very clear that she's writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It's exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because it's not overtly sexual."

No, silly, not Pedro Almodóvar. Even though my last two Blogs were about master filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, this CineBlog is about a completely different Pedro. MTV's Pedro Zamorra.

Last night I attended a screening of PEDRO at the Colony Theater in South Beach. This film opened the line-up for the 2009 Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival to a sold-out crowd and a standing ovation. PEDRO is the life story of the young AIDS activist Pedro Zamorra, Miami's own Cuban American, who was part of the cast of MTV's The Real World: San Francisco, and died at the age of 22, soon after the show finished airing its last episode in 1994.

I want to elaborate on a subject I touched on in my last blog, about when I met Pedro Almodóvar the week before he won an Academy Award for All about My Mother.

My friend John is an executive at United Artists (who distributed the film for the U.S.), and he is also a close friend of Pedro. John mentioned to me that UA had arranged for him to stay with his buddy Pedro at a high rollers suite @ the MGM Grand in Las Vegas; this is so Pedro could chill at and be pampered and de-stressed before he was named the winner of his first shiny golden Oscar. Well, guess who my friend John invited to go? ME!!!

We're only in the third month of the year, and already we've seen high-profile remakes of three different horror movies: My Bloody Valentine, Friday the 13^th and, most recently, The Last House on the Left. What's surprising about these movies isn't the fact that they're all remakes. Nothing is sacred in Hollywood, not even The Host and Oldboy - easily two of the best films of the decade, both slated to be streamlined and repackaged thanks to Tinseltown's recycling plant. No, what's surprising is that exploitation movies have entered the mainstream at all.

I'm writing this Cineblog about the new film by one of my all-time favorite directors, Pedro Almodóvar, whom I had the honor of meeting the week before he won an Academy Award for All about My Mother back in 2000.

Los Abrazos Rotos, or Broken Embraces, is the name of his new film. It premieres on March 18, and there is already buzz that it will play at Cannes. The teaser is very short, but leaves no doubt that this is a film by the one and only Almodóvar.

Alright, so you're a decently trained and young inexperienced actor and you finally got headshots you can live with. Then you got some more done. Now you got an entire book filled with a face only a mother could love and you even went so far as to land a reputable SAG licensed agent who also has the same taste as your mother. You are ready to be sold on the open market, but your agent hasn't had the time to give you the entire run-down. Well here it is. Most people in the biz will tell you never to listen to other actors... this is true, but there are some things that are a part of the starter set you should know. Before you start going out on the castings you've been so fortunate enough to be called on (thanks to those wonderful pictures), there are some necessary things you must have in your bag and in your car (or whatever transport you got) at ALL times. In your bag, you should have:

The 81st Annual Academy Awards are two days away. Going in, I'm fairly ambivalent about the outcome. Unlike last year, when There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men duked it out for the top prize, there are no masterpieces. I deeply admired Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Andrew Stanton's WALL-E and Gus Van Sant's Milk. These would have been my nominees for Best Director and Best Picture, but many of them got gypped.

Still, I'll definitely be tuning in. I've watched every awards show since 1990, when I was 9 going on 10. All 9-year-olds who watch the Oscars naturally assume they'll be making it to the podium someday. I'm sure if I looked hard enough I'd find a few acceptance speeches, written in chicken-scratch and tucked away for safekeeping. I'm more cynical and realistic about all that now - instead of 30, now I'm giving myself until 40 to win an Oscar. Now and then I'm forced to look away to avoid being blinded by all the Great and Important People basking in their own sense of self-worth. But mostly the Oscars give me a giddy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The teaser for Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited WWII epic, Inglourious Basterds, comes out today. You can catch it before the new Friday the 13th remake, which is appropriate enough given that Basterds (the misspelling is Tarantino's doing, not mine) looks like it's going to be a splatter-fest.

For an ode to pretentious, up-your-own-ass, "artistic" indie shit, there's nothing quite like the opening minutes of Baghead. The protagonists are at a film festival, where the film "We Are Naked" is having its world premiere. It's shot in grainy black-and-white, the dialogue is ludicrous, and just before the end-credits roll, the lead couple take off all their clothes and have sex. On their feet. In the front yard.

Latinos in the 2009 Award Season

The only quasi Latino thing to celebrate on the Oscar nomination list is Penelope Cruz's performance as best supporting actress in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, as you can read about in my previous blog, "Will Penelope Be Wearing Gold?" But even though Cruz is the only Hispanic name on the list, we come to consider if the Academy is being a bit racist in not nominating any more Latino talent in the recent year's Latin cinema. Is it because there is no other Latin talent out there? Nope, because talent there sure is! The Sundance Awards were recently announced, giving six Awards to Latino filmmakers and Latino films! How come none of these were recognized by the Academy?

When you look at this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Actress, one thing that sticks out is the number of nude scenes the actresses have appeared in. Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Angelina Jolie (Changeling), Kate Winslet (The Reader) - these are beautiful and mega-talented young women who have never shied away from on-camera nudity. Their nominations got me thinking about the nature of female sexuality in films.

After Dark Horrorfest sounded like a good idea - take eight independent horror films that deserve to be seen and given them theatrical distribution. Launched in 2006 by the Canadian filmmaker Courtney Solomon (An American Haunting), the annual event has unfortunately devolved into a weeklong shitfest. Every year I go, hoping the festival will build on the promise of its initial run, which showcased some solid fright flicks like The Abandoned and Wicked Little Things. And every year I go home sorely disappointed.

El Patio de mi Carcel - My Prison Yard This film is somewhat indifferent. The storyline is not very deep, but the performances are quite good. Veronica Echegui's performance is the only thing that saved this movie, perhaps the best role of her career that gives her a more promising future.

The plot: A petty thief and her pals attempt to adapt to life outside jail. But there is not much more depth to the overall story. Perhaps first-time director Belén Macías will get it right in her upcoming films.

It really has been a complicated and difficult year for Spanish film, without any blockbuster success in the billboards, different than in 2007 when The Orphanage or [REC] made box office smash numbers very close to Hollywood super productions.

A list of Spanish movies were added in the first quarter of 2008, international productions like Asterix at the Olympic Games and The Oxford Crimes that made some waves and increased the number of spectators attending premieres.

Following this wake some co-produced films were added as national films like Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Che, the Argentine, Transsiberian or El Greco, but their box office figures turned out to be really regrettable. These are not 100% Spanish produced, so they don't really count as exclusively Spanish films in my Opinion. Anyway, as 2008 is just past us, I made a couple of lists of 5- 100% Spanish films that, in my opinion, represent the best and the worst films of 2008. In this Cineblog you will read the Best and in the next Cineblog I will bring you the Worst.

How many times has this happened to you? You're watching a movie or a TV show and you know exactly where they're shooting... but you know that it may have been shot better somewhere else? Or you're watching something and now you have ideas of your own to shoot something but you don't know where to go to get the shot? Have you ever needed the perfect place to shoot a scene but can't afford to hire a location scout because you're a student or you're broke? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you should probably read this in case you're hoping to shoot in the Magic City... Miami, FL.

What are the three most important things in setting up business in the filmmaking business? Survey says: Location, Location, Location... Okay, now that we've got that down, you know that without it you'll be shooting in your mother's kitchen and in your father's garage, which per say is not a bad thing, unless that is... you have a lot of "on-location" type of shooting to do, then you need to get out and find it, Fast. First: Where does the story take place, what time of year, season? Do I need permits to shoot outside in public? Do you need seclusion, privacy in public? Do you need to stop a busy road but can't afford it? Well, I'm going to make this blog interactive by taking all specified questions you may have and answering them to the best of my knowledge. To boot, I know of thousands of different streets, alleys, bars, clubs, hotels, motels, houses, tourist traps, historical info, from who to grease for the shot and who not to, what places are camera crazy, I'm talking about anything about a location you need I might be able to help.

Is there anything worse than a movie that's been made for only one purpose: to win Oscars?

I'm talking, of course, about Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon and David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Here are two handsomely mounted productions that take no risks, offer no insights, and are just polite enough to win the Academy's favor. That's not to say these movies are bad, but they ARE boring. Don't let anyone tell you any different.

Latin Nominees for the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards

As we approach the end of the year, the award season begins for the best in film of 2008. One of the first ceremonies that just announced its nominees is the Independent Spirit Awards, the awards show for North America's independent film community. As for Hispanic and Latino nominations, we have four major nominees. On the Spanish side, the talents of Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem were recognized, as both got nominations for their collaborative work in Woody Allen's flick Vicky Cristina Barcelona

When it comes time to hand out the best-of-the-year awards, movies released in December get all the love. This is partly due to the fact that studios have been saving some of their best products for the holiday season, but sometimes it seems like movie critics and members of the Academy Awards of Arts and Sciences suffer from memory loss. So I thought it might be fun to see what the first 11 months of the year had to offer and make a best-of-the-year list from that. Keep in mind that I still haven’t seen some of the most anticipated films of the season, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon and Milk. I’ll write about those movies in future blogs. For now, here’s my nowhere-near definitive look at the best movies of 2008, listed in order of preference:

We all know filmmaking is a team effort. Nowadays almost everybody's seen the DVD features and the behind-the-scenes of their favorite movies and perhaps been overwhelmed by the number of people who are involved in the filmmaking process. Camera teams, lighting teams, post-production teams, stunt teams, wardrobe teams, animal wranglers and so on, we are all aware of the seemingly infinite amount of names and titles that keep scrolling up during the credits. Unfortunately, most people choose this time to stop sucking on those unpopped-popcorn seeds and start walking out of the theater (or turn the TV off, if you were already home), even though it's probably the only real public moment of acknowledgement that the "rigging gaffer" or the "second-second-second-assistant director" will get!

I started working in projection booths in 1999, the year Fight Club came out. As FC fans know, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) has a night job as a projectionist, which he uses as an opportunity to splice frames of pornography into Disney flicks.

CINEMAD is the cinematic brother of FESTIMAD. Born at the same time, in 1994, in Madrid’s Revolver Theater. Since then CINEMAD has never failed in its annual appointment with the Independent and Cult Film Festival. Cines Renoir Film Festival is involved promoting and exhibiting short films. Genres such as gore and animation, and successful filmmakers such as Santiago Segura, Álex de la Iglesia and Alejandro Amenábar, have found CINEMAD to be their launching platform. Other filmmakers have had similar success.

BOO-enas Noches, guys and ghouls. Welcome to the first-ever Halloween edition of Jr’s Cineblog, where we will be dissecting the best terror films to watch if you want to get spooked… en Español!!! In this list, we will bring to you the top horror, thriller and suspense films produced in Spanish. So grab your chili con carne popcorn… and cuddle up next to that special Mamasita or Papacito, and grant them the protection and tranquility they need from oh-so-terrifying Spanish celluloid horror.

The Japanese are building robots, holograms are appearing on the cable news, and Barack Obama is going to be the forty-forth President of the United States. Are we living in the future? Dunno, but what I do know is that pop culture has helped pave the way for the election of America's first Black president.

More than 700 people came out to the Aventura Mall on Thursday, Oct. 23, to attend the premiere of Director, a low-budget action movie shot in Miami.

It was a real coup for filmmaker Aleks Rosenberg, who both directed and served as the director of photography on the film. The maker of one previous feature, 2001's award-winning Zelimo, Rosenberg now teaches in the film department of Miami International University of Art & Design. He said he'd spent the last week-and-a-half working round-the-clock in the editing suite, making last-minute tweaks to prepare the film for its world premiere. The producers sent out invitations to more than 200 journalists, and the response was so enormous they had to rent out a second screen to show the film on.

It was about 5 years ago when I first learned that the term "VJ" could be used to describe someone other than a person on MTV telling me what videos to like. I had always loved movies, animation, electronic music and the visual arts. So the concept of a person that mixes video images live in the same way a DJ mixes music was very appealing to me. Since then, I've put together my own VJ setup and have had the opportunity to perform alongside some great musicians. I joined a band, and even went on tour a few times. As my ambitions and skills as a VJ have grown, I've realized that this could very well be the perfect job for me in the long run.

Noticia de un Secuestro or News of a Kidnapping, from the renowned author and credited Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, will be embodied in a film version next year and reach cinemas in 2010. This is not the first work of Garcia Marquez (or Gabo, as he is popularly known) to be brought to the cinema. Of Love and Other Demons and Love in the Time of Cholera also had their big-screen adaptations.

For a lot of people, filming movies and shorts is something they do as a hobby on their time off from "real" work, whenever they can gather enough friends to donate time and efforts into working as crew or actors. But those who have chosen to expand that passion and take on film and video production as a career might find it hard to figure out where to start. There are many paths one can take to making filmmaking an actual paying career. One isn't more adequate than the other. It all depends on what speaks to you the most.

It's happening again. After 10 years of carefully collecting more than 500 of my favorite movies on DVD, the home-video format is changing. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have duked it out, and the latter has emerged victorious. It's the beginning of the end for my DVD collection.

Welcome one, and Bienvenidos Todos(Welcome All) to the most original Spanglish Cine Blog, exclusively on Openfilm.com. This CineBlog is called "Junior's CineBlog", Junior being yours truly, Me!...... and "...CineBlog" meaning "...FilmBlog" in our neighboring tougue, and second official language of the United States, Spanglish! That is right. This unique bilingual film blog is going to bring you the latest scoops on the hottest topics in the Hispanic film industry, bringing you stories on film releases, Latin film personalities as well as film events all over the world, all with the particular thread of the Spanish/Latin/Hispanic inclination.