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Conan the Barbarian (1982)

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New "Kubrick Film" To Be Made
31 October 2006 (StudioBriefing)
The son-in-law of Stanley Kubrick is shepherding a film treatment titled Lunatic at Large to the screen after he discovered it among Kubrik's storage trunks, the New York Times reported today (Tuesday). According to the newspaper, Kubrick had commissioned the treatment from noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson in the 1950s, but it had become lost until the son-in-law, Philip Hobbs, discovered it after Kubrick's death in 1999. Hobbs told the Times, "I knew what it was right away, because I remember Stanley talking about 'Lunatic.' He was always saying he wished he knew where it was, because it was such a great idea." Veteran producer Edward R. Pressman (Phantom of the Paradise, Conan the Barbarian, Wall Street, The Crow) and London media company Finch & Partners are expected to announce today that the film will be directed by British TV director Chris Palmer from a finished script by Stephen R. Clarke.

Schwarzenegger Pumps Up American Soldiers
7 July 2003 (WENN)
Politically-inclined action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger personally beefed up Independence Day celebrations for American soldiers in Iraq on the Fourth of July. Inside fallen dictator Saddam Hussein's former summer vacation palace, the actor mixed self-deprecating jokes with praise for hundreds of soldiers who stood on marble floors and cheered from balconies draped with the American flag. He thanked soldiers for making the American way of life possible - and continued with talk likely to fuel speculation he will run for California governor. He said, "First of all congratulations for saying `hasta la vista baby' to Saddam Hussein. I came here from the United States because I wanted to pump you all up. This is really wild driving around here. I mean the poverty. And you see there is no money. Disastrous financially. Then there is a leadership vacuum. Pretty much like in California right now." Some soldiers were impressed with the muscleman's appearance - Captain Jeanette Husman, from Wisconsin, says, "It's pretty bad when you have to get deployed in Iraq to see him." But Staff Sergeant Dominique Rollins was a little disappointed - he says, "Actually he is a lot smaller than I thought he was going to be. I was picturing Conan. I saw Kindergarten Cop." And still others had better ideas about which celebrities would really make their day. Specialist Julio Lopez says, "They need to bring J.Lo out here. Oh yeah, I am a big fan of hers."

Movie Reviews: 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'
18 December 2002 (StudioBriefing)
The second Lord of the Rings movie is piling up a tower of impressive reviews even from critics who have not been generous in their assessments of the competing Harry Potter and Star Trek epics. Among the three, "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the best, and not by just a little," writes Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. "It alone among them transcends," he adds. John Anderson in Newsday notes that although Jackson has taken a few liberties with Tolkien's novel, "the results are stirring, epic and an adventure of old-fashioned substance and eye-popping visuals, and a film that gives escapism a very good name." Similarly, Michael Sragow writes in the Baltimore Sun: "As escapist entertainment, it's the movie of the year." Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News calls it "a masterpiece of epic filmmaking." Comparing the original Fellowship of the Ring with Tower, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe concludes that the new film "is better: tighter, smarter, funnier, and graced with a more realized sense of epochs shifting on the actions of smallish individuals." Jonathan Foreman in the New York Post writes that it is also "darker, faster and more violent." Peter Howell in the Toronto Star says that "the movie plays like a true blockbuster follow-up: the action is bigger, the characters are more numerous and the stakes are much higher." Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times devotes most of his review to praising the accomplishments of the film's director. He begins by remarking: "The director Peter Jackson's scrupulous devotion to the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy manifests itself in a gripping, intense fashion." But Roger Ebert returns to a theme he first advanced in his review of Fellowship -- that Jackson has short-changed the Hobbits. "He has taken an enchanting and unique work of literature and retold it in the terms of the modern action picture. If Tolkien had wanted to write about a race of supermen, he would have written a Middle-Earth version of Conan the Barbarian. But no. He told a tale in which modest little hobbits were the heroes. And now Jackson has steered the story into the action mainstream. To do what he has done in this film must have been awesomely difficult, and he deserves applause, but to remain true to Tolkien would have been more difficult, and braver."

Schwarzenegger Returning As Conan
30 January 2002 (WENN)
Arnold Schwarzenegger is returning as Conan The Barbarian - nearly 20 years after the mystical warrior's last movie. Arnold broke into Hollywood's big time with 1982's Conan The Barbarian and its 1984 sequel Conan The Destroyer - and is now waiting for the script to be finalized for a third instalment. Writer and film-maker John Milius, who directed the first Conan movie, is currently trimming his screenplay following advice from the Wachowski Brothers, who made The Matrix. "I just had a cigar with him the other day," Schwarzenegger reveals. "He's rewriting it as we speak, because he has written it, and it was a 168-page script. One of the Wachowski Brothers called and told him the script would take too much time and be a three-and-a-half-hour movie, he should cut it down to 120 pages and take certain things out. And that's what he's doing right now."