Word: hbo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...years old, the actor, director and producer has made something of a second career out of spreading the lunar word, first with his star turn in 1995's Apollo 13, then with his 1998 HBO series, From the Earth to the Moon. Now Hanks is working the space beat again, preparing for this month's release of Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, co-produced by IMAX and Hanks' own production company, Playtone. A 3-D, 70-mm, giant-screen spectacle that Hanks co-wrote and narrates, the movie re-creates what it's like to travel...
...another's bed. The payoff? Most episodes ended with a vicious fight to eliminate a contestant. The ratings spiked for Spike, and the Griffin-Bonnar light-heavyweight showdown, the live finale of the series, saw 2.6 million late-night viewers tune in, handily beating the peak rating of HBO's boxing events that season. Griffin won the fight--and the contract--in a disputed decision but, spurred by the excitement, White and the Fertittas gave Bonnar a contract as well...
...when HBO set out to make a drama about Rome in the time of Julius Caesar, Job One was to dirty up the Eternal City. Rome (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T., debuts Aug. 28) eschews the popular white-marble myth. "Part of the brief was to create an image of Rome nobody has seen before," says executive producer Frank Doelger. Historic Rome, he says, was a teeming capital full of color, pornographic graffiti and coed public latrines. It was crowded, relentlessly commercial (a town crier's announcement in one episode ends with an ad for a flour miller) and, above...
That squalor did not come cheap. The set alone, at Rome's Cinecittà studio lot, cost $13 million and the 12-episode first season, $100 million. Shooting began in March 2004 but was delayed as HBO shuffled producers and reshot chunks of the first three episodes (directed by filmmaker Michael Apted). It also had the largely British cast drop the regional accents they had used to distinguish the classes, deeming them too inscrutable for Americans...
...main failing of Rome, a BBC co-production, is that it is more like an expensive I, Claudius than a work of HBO iconoclasm. The visuals are staggering--you see every penny spent--but cosmetic changes aside, it does not rethink its genre as, say, Deadwood did the western. At heart, it is largely a history-book story with familiar themes, enacted by regal men with British accents. One has to wonder what HBO would have had if it had let Deadwood creator David Milch do the more unusual series he once proposed: a drama about ancient Roman city cops...