Independent – Page 6 – Anywhere But Hollywood

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing

September 12, 2026

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.” — T.S. Eliot In I’VE HEARD…

Smooth Talk

September 9, 2026

As a child, she played an extra in a Martin Scorsese film and had to eat an ice cream cone on camera. It took 19…

A Ghost Story

September 4, 2026

He had just finished a Disney movie. Dragons, effects, a budget in the tens of millions. Then he disappeared for nineteen days and shot a…

Robot Jox

August 25, 2026

It started as an attempt to film Homer. The hero is named Achilles. The woman he loves is Athena. Stuart Gordon, who had just made…

The Ninth Configuration

August 24, 2026

Five years after The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty had a screenplay nobody wanted. Columbia developed it and let it go. Universal turned it down, according…

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

August 22, 2026

Jean-Luc Godard wanted Norman Mailer to write and star in a modern adaptation of King Lear, with Mailer playing a mob boss called Don Learo.…

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

August 19, 2026

The book was banned by the occupying Soviet regime. When offered the film adaptation, Miloš Forman refused, fearing for his sons in Czechoslovakia. Instead, he…

Wet Hot American Summer

August 18, 2026

The actors were dressed in shorts and t-shirts and It rained almost every day of the shoot. When a scene needed sunshine, the crew held…

The Addiction

August 17, 2026

The Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw named it one of the greatest films of all time. Tokyo Story. Paths of Glory. Raging Bull. Andrei…

A Midnight Clear

August 16, 2026

A whole generation of American film, packed into one small 1992 movie not enough people saw. The director was Keith Gordon, who played the bullied…

A Nightmare on Elm Street

August 13, 2026

In the late 1970s, healthy young men began dying in their sleep. Mostly Hmong refugees, they would go to bed and just not wake up,…

Carnival of Souls

August 12, 2026

He made workplace-safety reels, driver’s-ed shorts, educational filmstrips. He drove past a rotting lakeside pavilion and could not stop picturing dead figures dancing inside it.…

Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven

August 11, 2026

In the notorious 1995 flop Showgirls, there was a background stripper named Penny Slot. Most people forgot about her the moment the credits rolled. Rena…

Sisters

August 10, 2026

He was haunted by a story in Life magazine about a pair of conjoined twins. In the photo the two girls sat side by side,…

I Origins

August 9, 2026

This was never meant to be the film. It was supposed to be the backstory. After Fox Searchlight acquired Another Earth, co-writer Mike Cahill sold…