Jake's getting his ticket punched and collecting more stamps in his passport. The Source Code Eurorail is rolling.
First stop Madrid and Jake looked great Next stop Rome and Jake? Looking better than ever.
( Quick run out for coffees, who wants one?)
Next stop Berlin
Remember the story about Jake giving Kiki a kitten when they were living together? Funny. Who knew he was allergic to cats. Hmmm, makes you wonder about living with one then.
Then it again it could all go back to when Maggie made his play a cat for their performance of "Cats".
Jake also talks about starting work on End of Watch in LA's South Central starting in July.
Jake is making the rounds with Source Code today it's Spain. And while he is Colter Stevens, he is not the only C.S. in the house.
When OTH is over, the next chance to see Austin on screen will be in the movie Beautiful Boy, as writer Cooper Stearns. "Bill and Kate hopelessly try to find some hint of an explanation after finding out that their only son committed a mass shooting at his university before taking his own life. They struggle numbly through the funeral, the media onslaught, and the awkward pity from relatives and friends. Their already strained marriage is tested as they realize all they have left with each other is their shared grief and confusion—and the unfortunate legacy of their son. This life-altering event forces Bill and Kate to face their feelings of guilt, rage, blame, self-discovery –and ultimately hope—so that they can finally see each other and their chance for happiness again with clear eyes." Cooper is chronicling the story of what happened that day and the days that follow for those left behind.
Beautiful Boy is opening in limited release on May 20th.
And with that Austin adds initials to the alliteration movie club. ... Donnie Darko, Bubble Boy, Good Girl, Moonlight Mile.
OTH is still in repeats for two more weeks. But when it returns its Austin's night to shine, as director this time. And a little spoiler - looks like both Julian and BrookeDavis(TM) will each have a little one to hold.
For Two Wheel Tuesday
What happens to an impoverished developing nation town when you flood it with 20,000 bicycles? You lift three times that number of people out of poverty. Pedals for Progress and founder David Schweidenback have been shipping used American bicycles to Rivas, Nicaragua for the last two decades and the transformation has been incredible.
Bicycle City Film (official site) Pedals for Progress "rescue bicycles destined for overburdened U.S. landfills and ship them to developing countries where they are sorely needed and highly valued. P4P bikes are put to work not only as basic transportation, but are used as a supplement to school and community programs. The bikes are adapted for use as trash haulers, produce trucks, taxis, and farm machinery. Some of the municipalities even sponsor recreational cycling programs, making bikes available to all who care to participate."
Have a bike to donate or want to find out if there is a bike drive near you? Check it out here: Pedals for Progress
A little Luck today and maybe for Austin? (Can we cross our fingers?) With Jake taking a movie shooting in July, it is the biggest indicator that Austin has finished up with OTH and is moving on. So what's next?
Austin has talked about how proud he was of JFC, how much he like working on the show, and how much he liked working with Milch, both on Deadwood and JFC. We know that working with Milch on JFC had created the best performance Austin's done to date.
We've said it once and say it again.
Get back to Milch. As luck would have it, Milch is back with HBO and working on a new series. Not the NY cop drama In the Ninth, but a show about the world of house racing called Luck.
Milch teamed up with longtime friend Michael Mann to shoot the pilot last year, which HBO was enthused about enough to order a season to premiere later this year. Their friendship "goes back to the days when Milch was running 'Hill Street Blues' and Mann was doing the same with 'Miami Vice.' " Luck is look at horse racing -- the owners, gamblers, jockeys and industry players as only Milch can. "The pilot is about a bunch of intersecting lives in the world of horse racing," Milch told Daily Variety. "It's a subject which has engaged and some might say has compelled me for 50 years. I've joked that if I just can make $25 million on this show, I'll be even on research expenses. I find it as complicated and engaging a special world as any I've ever encountered, not only in what happens in the clubhouse and the grandstand, but also on the backside of the track, where the training is done and where they house the horses."
The lead character is Ace Bernstein, played by Dustin Hoffman , who Milch has described as "a guy versed in all the permutations of finance, elicit and otherwise. When he is released from jail for securities violations, he resumes his place at the race track, where he is a figure of long-standing repute."
Co-starring in the series is Nick Nolte, and the pilot, also featured Richard Kind, John Ortiz, Kevin Dunn, Jason Gedrick, Richie Coster, Ian Hart, Tom Payne, Kerry Condon and Gary Stevens. The theme in Luck is the idea that a horse crossing the finish line before another can change a man's life and how all the show's characters even peripheral ones are "invested in that illusion: jockeys, owners, trainers, low-lifes, misfits, criminals," gamblers alike. The similarity to his series Deadwood is much the same, every man for himself, as long as every man agrees it's a prize worth winning.
Milch along with creating and writing the series, is an executive producer, along with former HBO programming topper Carolyn Strauss and Mann.
They have shot 6 episodes of the first season at the Santa Anita Race Track and around the LA area. The world of horse racing and the track is nothing new for Milch "When I was a kid, my dad used to take me out to the race track and so many formative experiences have to do with associations like that. My relationship with the track was, I would say, at least fractionally as complicated as my relationship with my old man. So it kept me coming back." In addition he's owned close to 100 horses, racing his horses all over the world, and has one the Breeders' Cup race twice in 1992 and in 2001.
Milch does like to use people he has worked with before to cast in his projects.
Austin's a wee bit tall to play a jockey, but it would be nice to see him step outside the box and get a couple episodes as someone very unexpected.
Passing away a week ago, today's Out Spotlight is an actor who is probably best known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock. Today's Out Spotlight is actor Farley Granger.
Farley Earle Granger was born in San Jose, California, the son of Eva and Farley Earle Granger on July 1, 1925 His father owned car dealership, giving his family a good life. Following the stock market crash in 1929, the Grangers were forced to their home in San Jose and their beach home along with most of their personal belongings, moving into an apartment above the dealership for two years. Their financial collapse and fall from their social sent Granger's parents to drink heavily. Eventually everything they owned was sold to settle their debts, with his father using the last car on his lot to move the family to Los Angeles in the middle of the night settling into a small apartment in a seedy part of Hollywood.
Granger's father found work as a clerk in the North Hollywood branch of the California Department of Unemployment, and soon put a small down payment on a house in Studio City, where their neighbor was actor/dancer Donald O'Connor.
Hoping Granger might become a tap dancer, his mother enrolled him at Ethel Meglin's, the dance and drama instruction studio where Judy Garland and Shirley Temple had gotten their starts. His parent's drinking increased as they work various jobs to try and make a living. Soon their fighting did too.
His father was advised by Harry Langdon to take Granger to a small local theater for open auditions for The Wookie, a British play about Londoners struggling to survive during World War II. Granger got the part, actually multiple parts in the play. Opening night, a casting agent spotted him and brought Granger to the attention of studio boss Samuel Goldwyn. The following morning Gersh contacted Granger's parents and asked them to bring him to his office that afternoon. In 1943, while he was still a student at North Hollywood High School, he signed to a seven-year contract with MGM for a $100 a week.
His first role was Damian, a teenage Russian boy in the film The North Star. Upon completion of his second movie, The Purple Heart, his career was halted for US Navy service during World War II.
"I was chronically seasick." and the remainder of his military career was spent onshore, where he first was assigned to an enlisted men's club situated at the end of Waikiki Beach and then to a unit commanded by classical actor Maurice Evans, where he had the opportunity to meet and mingle with visiting entertainers like Bob Hope, Betty Grable, Hedy Lamarr and Gertrude Lawrence.
While stationed in Honolulu he had his first sexual experiences, one with a hostess at a private club and the other with a handsome Navy officer visiting the same venue, both on the same night. He discovered he was attracted to both men and women equally.
"I finally came to the conclusion that for me, everything I had done that night was as natural and as good as it felt . . . I never have felt the need to belong to any exclusive, self-defining, or special group . . . I was never ashamed, and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships to anyone . . . I have loved men. I have loved women." When he finished his stint in the Navy, he returned to Hollywood and the Goldwyn publicity machine.
Granger was cast in the film noir Thieves Like Us. The film was nearing completion in October 1947 when Howard Hughes acquired RKO Radio Pictures, who shelved it for two years before releasing it under the title They Live by Night in a single theater in London. Enthusiastic reviews led RKO to finally release the film in the States in late 1949. During the two years it had remained in limbo, it had been screened numerous times in private screening rooms, and one of the people who saw it during this period was Alfred Hitchcock, who was preparing for the movie, Rope.
Granger was in New York when he was called back to Hollywood and discuss Rope with Hitchcock. The night before their initial meeting, Granger coincidentally met Arthur Laurents, who had written the film's screenplay, which was based on the play Rope's End, a fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb murder case. It wasn't until he began reading the script that he connected its author with the man he had met the previous night. Granger and Laurents met again, and Laurents invited the actor to spend the night. He declined, but when the offer was extended again several days later, he accepted. It proved to be the start of a romantic relationship that lasted about a year and a frequently tempestuous friendship that extended for decades beyond their breakup.
Filmed in 10-minute takes,Rope, resulting in an elegantly artificial movie, with the actors even more puppet-like than was usual with Hitchcock. Granger and John Dall were cast as gay students who murder a friend to display a Nietzschean concept of supremacy. Granger played the highly strung Phillip a pianist, who cracks under the probing of their tutor (Jimmy Stewart). The public were less than enthusiastic. The director Jean Renoir scathingly dismissed the film, adding that it was "a film about homosexuals in which they don't even show the boys kissing".
In the films that followed, he appeared as a petty thief who gets in over his head with the mob in Side Street; a young man who kills a priest with a crucifix in Edge of Doom; and an adopted orphan in Our Very Own. Both were unpleasant working experiences, and the Granger refused to allow the producer to loan him to Universal Pictures for an inferior magic carpet saga. He was placed on suspension.
He decided to accompany Ethyl Chaplin, who had separated from her husband, and her daughter on a trip to Paris. At the last moment they were joined by Laurents, who remained behind when the group departed for London to see the opening of the New York City Ballet, which had been choreographed by Jerome Robbins. They had a brief affair until the actor was summoned to return to New York to help publicize Our Very Own and Edge of Doom, both of which received dreadful reviews. Goldwyn canceled the nationwide openings of the latter, hoping to salvage it by adding wraparound scenes that would change the focus of the film, and Granger refused to promote it any further. Once again he was placed on suspension. As he departed for Europe this time with Laurents, he contacted about an another film by Hitchcock.
The project was Strangers on a Train, in which Granger was cast as amateur tennis player and aspiring politician Guy Haines. He is introduced to psychopathic Bruno Anthony, portrayed by Robert Walker, who suggests they swap murders, with Bruno killing Guy's wife and Guy disposing of Bruno's father. As with Rope, there was a homosexual subtext to the two men's relationship, although it was toned down the original novel. It proved to be a box office hit, the first major success of his career, and his "happiest filmmaking experience.
After appearing opposite Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Anderson in 1952, he bought out his Goldwyn contract and traveled to Europe in 1954 where he starred in Luchino Visconti's Senso. After his detour through Italy, he starred in two 1955 movies: The Naked Street with Anthony Quinn and The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing with Joan Collins and Ray Milland.
Although he returned to Hollywood at the height of his stardom, he walked away from it - to really learn his craft. He spent the rest of his career in a mix of movies, television and stage work. He relocated to New York, where he appeared in several plays, including The Heiress, Advise and Consent and The King and I. He spent two years with the National Repertory Theatre, starring in such plays as The Crucible, The Seagull, She Stoops to Conquer and Hedda Gabler. During those days of live television, he performed on a number of leading programs, including Playhouse 90, The U.S. Street Hour, Studio One, Climax and Kraft Theater.
In the 70's Granger went on to guest star on such show Ironside, Hondo, Wagon Train, Get Smart, Hawaii Five-O and Medical Center, among others. He returned to Europe to appear in several films: The Man Called Noon, They Call Me Trinity and The Serpent.
In 1980, he returned to Broadway to stage in a production of Deathtrap.
He also appeared in the daytime soaps As the World Turns in 1986-87 and The Edge of Night in 1980. During the '80s and '90s, he made frequent guest appearances on Tales From the Dark Side, The Love Boat, Murder, She Wrote and Monsters.
In 1995 he contributed to the documentary The Celluloid Closet (1995), an examination of homosexuality in Hollywood movies.
His last film appearance was in the art world satire The Next Big Thing in 2001.
Granger managed to keep his bisexuality a secret during his Hollywood career, until 2007, he published a memoir of his life called Include Me Out co-written with his long-term partner, producer Robert Calhoun. documented his affairs with Shelley Winters, Ava Gardner and Patricia Neal as well as playwright Arthur Laurents and fling with Leonard Bernstein.
"There were cliques for gays, like the one that met at (director) George Cukor's house," he recalled. "I was never invited, and I don't think I would have gone if I had been. I was fortunate to join the musical crowd." He became friends with Judy Garland, actress Betty Garrett, composers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and others who met Sundays at Gene Kelly's house for competitive sports in the backyard and The Game (charades) indoors. ... Granger feels lucky to have been part of Hollywood's Golden Age. He writes about what may have been the quintessential Hollywood party. Gary Cooper called to invite Granger to a party for Clark Gable. Granger quickly accepted. And would he escort Barbara Stanwyck, newly divorced from Robert Taylor? Of course.
The Cooper estate overflowed with the town's elite: Greer Garson, Ronald Colman, Jimmy Stewart, David Niven, Ray Milland, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, Myrna Loy and many others.
"Clark Gable arrived late, and it was an entrance to remember," Granger writes. "He stopped for a moment at the top of the stairs that led down into the garden. He was alone, tanned, and wearing a white suit. He radiated charisma. He really was The King."
His relationship with actress Shelley Winters was the most documented. "My lifelong romance with Shelley was very much a love affair. It evolved into a very complex relationship, and we were close until the day she died."
Asked by New York Magazine when the book came out, while he didn't like to call himself gay or even bisexual. He responded, We're not going to emerge as untarnished until we get rid of labels. Until we have the perception that sex is only part of what makes up a human, the enemy will always be able to say, "He's just a faggot."
Granger was with his longtime partner Robert Calhoun, a soap opera producer, for over 40 years until Calhoun's death in 2008.
Saying he had become bored with the process of film-making and retired, devoting himself to travel and his greatest love, the theater, now as a spectator.
Farley Granger passed away last Sunday March 27th at the age of 85.
Jake's been talking a lot of Lincoln lately. First with Conan, "the Abe Lincoln of talk show hosts" and warning him not to go to the show, then he's talked about Source Coding back to Abe for the last 8 minutes. So what caused all this Lincoln thinking? Maybe this fella? Or more likely the one who snapped it.
Under the guise of a 12 day trip to Indonesia, Austin Nichols has been secretly working in an intensive vocal training program to prepare for a shot on the show The Voice. "Singing has been a passion of mine. Turning thirty last year I made a goal that I would kick start my singing career. I did have the chance to sing the theme song for the episode I directed this season.I've been really busy this year with the show and I had to wait it was was over for before I pursued it. As soon my contracted ended I was on the first plane out of there, heading to live out my dreams. I only have a couple weeks left to do this." "I hoping to go on The Voice and be recognized for something more than my alarming good looks. It's tough being so damn handsome."
"What do I like to sing? I'm big fan of Kitty Wells and 'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels', but I've really found my place as a singer with a combination of Western Swing, showtunes, Tibetan throat singing, and the Bee Gees. It works well with my range."
"I've been working on material over the past year, and working with a vocal coach for almost a year, lots of vocalization, extending my range and improving my technique. I just found a new coach to work with for my throat singing." " Adam will probablythink it's me trying to get to sing with his band again, but I really want to work with Cee-lo, just for the outfits alone.""I'm going to start with the Theme to Thundercats. But my go to song is Katy Perry's "Fireworks" I think I can go all the way." Happy Austin Friday. (and a little April Fool's too)
Somewhere in the world there is a big tall Texan with a beer in one hand and a mike in another belting out this one out today. ; )
This blog is strictly for entertainment purposes. Its writers make no serious claims about the sexuality of either Jake Gyllenhaal or Austin Nichols. This blog is in no way affiliated with any Hollywood person or agency. Images and music used within this blog belong to their respective copyright owners and no infringement of copyright is ever intended.
( Quick run out for coffees, who wants one?)
