Can the Sundance Channel's Brick City inspire change in America's grittiest inner cities? The panel the show assembled for Friday's Television Critics Association press tour suggests it's possible: It featured members of the rival Crips and Bloods gang sharing the stage with a police director from Newark, N.J., where the documentary is set.
Sundance is presenting Brick City as a street-level portrayal of inner city life that offers more nuance and optimism than HBO's The Wire. Executive produced by Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, it features Newark's mayor, Cory Booker, whose campaign to unseat Newark's previous mayor was the subject of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Street Fight.
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Booker spoke ...
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Traci Lords will help Zack & Miri Make a Porno, says the Reporter. Also joining Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks and Jason Mewes in the Kevin Smith comedy are Craig Robinson (The Office) and Ricky Mabe (Beautiful People).... Juno's Ellen Page next will play a teen from a small Texas town who forsakes the beauty-pageant circuit to become a roller-derby queen in Whip It!, Drew Barrymore's directorial debut.... Also per Variety, Forest Whitaker is in talks to front Patriots, a real-life-inspired drama about Al Collins, the hoops coach who led John Ehret High School's hoops team to the Louisiana state championship a year after Katrina displaced scores of students.... Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay will bow at the South by Southwest Film Festival, taking place March 7-15 in Austin, Texas.
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As we celebrated the landmark 300th outing of ER tonight with a rare episode directed by series executive producer John Wells I was thrilled to see the powerhouse acting of Maura Tierney and Goran Visnjic as the centerpiece of the episode For those of us who have been fans since that very first episode 14 years ago is that even possible it is gratifying to see this show still telling compelling heartfelt stories about characters that we care about I havent always liked where the story went but Ive certainly enjoyed the ride Thank God Abby finally came clean to Luka I honestly didnt think I was going to be able to take much more of relapse Abby and I was so relieved that all the secrets and lies were out on the table There are a million things I could say about the unfortunate timing of Abbys disclosure in the wake of Lukas loss but my complaint would be mostly about the acrobatics that the writers have had to perform to work aro
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Forest Whitaker and Marc Levin are executive-producing for Showtime Mr. Untouchable, a drama series that will tell the true-crime story of Harlem heroin lord Leroy "Nicky" Barnes (played by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the current box-office hit American Gangster). Whitaker's project has no connection to Ridley Scott's feature, Variety notes, but instead is based on Levin's just-released documentary of the same name. The series will chronicle how Barnes built a wildly successful drug empire in the 1970s, albeit at some expense to his Harlem neighborhood.
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Former The Shield player Forest Whitaker is set to direct and executive-produce a new FX drama pegged as The Sopranos set in the world of arms dealers, says the Reporter.... The Doctors, a tentatively titled spin-off of Dr. Phil, is being eyed for a fall-2008 syndication berth.... NBC has ordered a pilot script for Outsourced, a comedy about a customer-service manager who, when his department is outsourced to India, travels east to train his replacement.... Scribe Zach Helm (Stranger Than Fiction) will develop with ABC Rockville 2020, a drama about a small Oregon town that, out of fear of becoming irrelevant, bids on the 2020 Olympics.
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