MovieSet News

During our regular Monday meeting we had an onset spy surreptitiously snap a behind the scenes photo with his iPhone:

The person with his back to the camera is yours truly, to my left is MovieSet CEO, Colleen Nystedt, with Peewee (the real boss) in her lap. Next to Colleen are the two Ryans, not to be confused with the old English comedy duo The Two Ronnies. On Ryan's lap is Max the Bichon Frise, who as though it would appear so, was not chairing the meeting. And finally, and in the most unflattering pose, is someone who now hates me, fellow blogger Patrick Sauriol, who is either listening intently, sniffing his own armpit or sneaking in a little catnap.

Backbone Magazine has released its Web 2.0 Awards - PICK 20:

With this issue, Backbone and KPMG unveil the PICK 20, the first and only national roundup of Canada’s Web 2.0 pioneers and practitioners. In the pages that follow you will discover 20 companies that are leading the way into the second iteration of the Web.

Here's the list:

Hollywood & Wine has wrapped principal photography. Oodles of SNL alumni and other notables including two brothers of the gone-to-soon, Chris Farley make up the principals in this comedy about the ambitions of a frustrated wannabe movie star who looks to much like an already famous and somewhat notorious screen siren.

Head on over to Matt Berman's exclusive MovieSet blog for more on his feelings about the shoot coming to a successful end. Congrats to the cast and crew of Hollywood and Wine for gettin' her done. Enjoy the wrap party and have fun editing.

I had the pleasure of working with actor Don S. Davis, who passed away on the weekend, on a made for TV movie called Beyond Loch Ness. I was impressed with his professionalism, candor about the film business, sense of humor and accessibility.

Between takes, even on the rainy days when everyone else was running for their warm and dry trailers, Don had time for any crew member who wanted to bend his ear at the Craft Service table or around the cast tent. With me, he spoke candidly about the gratitude he had for his successful and almost accidental acting career, a passion for teaching and slowing down toward retirement in a few short years.

Don was an Officer and a Gentleman and he will be missed.

Hey, is it alright to self-congratulate yourself? The MovieSet blog has been selected by Alltop, one of the internet's leading resources for finding cool content. Yup, we're now listed on their directory for movie websites. I want to give a shout out of thanks to the Alltop people for placing the MovieSet blog on their site, thank ya, thank ya.

And look, they have these groovy buttons that identify we're an Alltop site, like this:

Hey, I've got some great news to share with you just before the weekend hits: we've wrangled "Hollywood & Wine" co-director/co-writer Matt Berman to start blogging about the production exclusively on MovieSet! Distilling this ultra-cool news to plainspeak, what it means is that we'll have another creative voice sharing their thoughts and insider perspective about how a movie gets made. Matt is busy preparing to start directing his project but he wants to send us twice-weekly updates about how things are going.

So remember that time two days ago (and in my last blog entry) when I said that there were some amazing things in the near future pipeline that I couldn't share with you until later on? Well, now is later and I can spill the beans about one of the very cool things happening with MovieSet.

Our MovieSet team is back from Cannes. After spending the better part of two weeks at the world's most prestigious film festival, spending time meeting movers and shakers and filmmakers at our booth, our six peeps are glad to be back home. Our intention was to hit Cannes and show off the flexibility, potential and fun of the MovieSet idea and how filmmakers and fans can interact with each other, exchange information and do that social networking thang.

The stars came out for the world premiere of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" at the Cannes Film Festival. Director Steven Spielberg, star Harrison Ford and producer George Lucas were all in attendance wearing their tuxedos, walking down the red carpet and waving to the assembled photographers and fans. And which group just happened to be there with them? If you guessed Ryan Seacrest and his "American Idol" ctew, wrong! It happened to be us, the MovieSet team, and we've got the photos that prove it!

In 2008 a crack commando unit of MovieSet personnel were sent to the Cannes Film Festival. Their mission? To infiltrate the world's most prestigious film festival, to get invited to all of the hottest parties, to covertly maintain surveillance on A-list actors and to spread the word to the global film players that MovieSet is open for business.