Biography

Coming to Hollywood as a celebrated boy genius featuring a spectacular career arc in New York including his radio hoax War of the Worlds, Orson Welles is stymied on the subject for his first film. After a dinner party at Hearst Castle, during which he has a verbal altercation with William Randolph Hearst, Welles decides to do a movie about Hearst. It takes him some time to convince co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and the studio, but Welles eventually gets the script and the green light, keeping the subject very hush-hush with the press. The movie is about an aging newspaper publisher who controlled his enemies as ruthlessly as he controlled his friends; and whose mistress was destined for fame. When a rough cut is screened, Hearst gets wind of the movie’s theme and begins a campaign to see that it is not only never publicly screened, but destroyed.
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Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann is a 1992 documentary film directed by Joshua Waletzky. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
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After their production “Princess Ida” meets with less-than-stunning reviews, the relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan is strained to breaking. Their friends and associates attempt to get the two to work together again, which opens the way to “The Mikado,” one of the duo’s greatest successes.
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A documentary film based on the life of scientist Steven Hawking. The film explores the intimate life of Steven Hawking through him, his friends and his family, as he goes through school, is diagnosed with a degenerative disease, and discovers revolutionary theories about time, black holes, and the origin of the universe. A visually interesting and at times funny film about a extraordinary life.
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Paul Snider is a narcissistic, small time hustler who fancies himself a ladies man. His life changes when he meets Dorothy Stratten working behind the counter of a Dairy Queen. Dorothy is a pretty but naive high school senior. Paul immediately falls for Dorothy, who sees in Paul a wise, worldly person unlike herself. Paul believes Dorothy is Playboy material, the magazine he sees as only a springboard to bigger and better things. Paul’s dream does become a reality: not only does Dorothy eventually marry him, she becomes the August 1979 Playboy Playmate and ultimately Playboy Playmate of 1979, which does indeed lead to the start of an acting career. As Dorothy’s star rises, Paul’s life is one of a hanger-on as those in Dorothy’s new circle, including Playboy publisher Hugh M. Hefner and movie director Aram Nicholas, don’t much like Paul. Paul is unable to eke out a life of his own without using Dorothy’s name, which she increasingly is reluctant to provide to her husband.
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Zürich in the mid 50‘s: The young shy teacher Ernst Ostertag becomes a member of the gay organisation DER KREIS. There he gets to know the transvestite star Röbi Rapp – and immediately falls head over heels in love with him. Röbi and Ernst live through the high point and the eventual decline of the organization, which in the whole of Europe is seen as the pioneer of gay emancipation. Ernst finds himself torn between his bourgeois existence and his commitment to homosexuality, for Röbi it is about his first serious love relationship. A relationship which will last a lifetime. The film looks back from the present to the time when the „Mother“ of all European homosexual organizations had its high point to the time it slowly fell apart. While the repression against homosexuals became increasingly more intense in Zürich, two young and very different men fight for their love and – together with their friends – for the rights of gays.
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Swedish painter Anders Zorn gained notoriety for his nudes. His works are currently worth millions. The film is set in the time when Zorn, already respected for his art, was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Swedish king. Though an excellent painter, Zorn’s personal life is dreadful. A boozer and a womanizer who frequently cheats on his wife, Zorn constantly seeks approval for his art. When he travels to the U.S. for a tour he meets Emilie Bartlett the wife of sculptor Paul W. Bartlett with whom he begins a sporadic affair. After Paul commits suicide, Zorn and Emilie move to Sweden. Zorn disregards his wife’s feelings and openly displays his affections for Emilie.
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Pug, a wisecracking 13 year old living on a dangerous Westside block, has one goal in mind: to join The Twelve O’Clock Boys; the notorious urban dirt-bike gang of Baltimore. Converging from all parts of the inner city, they invade the streets and clash with police, who are forbidden to chase the bikes for fear of endangering the public. When Pug’s older brother dies suddenly, he looks to the pack for mentorship, spurred by their dangerous lifestyle. Pug’s story is coupled with unprecedented, action-packed coverage of the riders in their element. The film presents the pivotal years of change in a boy’s life growing up in one of the most dangerous and economically depressed cities in the US.
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Loring “Red” Nichols is a cornet-playing country boy who goes to New York in the 1920s full of musical ambition and principles. He gets a job playing in Wil Paradise’s band, but quits to pursue his dream of playing Dixieland jazz. He forms the “Five Pennies” which features his wife, Bobbie, as vocalist. At the peak of his fame, Red and Bobbie’s daughter, Dorothy, develops polio. Red quits the music business to move to Los Angeles where the climate is better for Dorothy. As Dorothy becomes a young teen, she learns of her father’s musical past, and he is persuaded to open a small nightclub which is failing until some noted names from his past come to help out.
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Now old, ill, poor, and largely forgotten, William Freise-Greene was once very different. As young and handsome William Green he changed his name to include his first wife’s so that it sounded more impressive for the photographic portrait work he was so good at. But he was also an inventor and his search for a way to project moving pictures became an obsession that ultimately changed the life of all those he loved.
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