(And here you thought all the double entendre headlines were done now that Kevin Smith’s Zack And Miri Make A Porno had came and went from theaters…)

No, Mel Gibson sporting a puppet on his hand does not mean he is recording a bit for Craig Ferguson’s Late, Late Show. He is currently filming the comedy The Beaver on location in New York City withh Jodie Foster directing.

The screenplay, which landed at the number 1 position on last year’s Black List round up of the best unproduced scripts making the rounds of Hollywood at the time, centers on a stressed-out guy who discovers that he can communicate more honestly through a beaver puppet he found in the trash. And while I’m usually not one to link to stories originating on a gossip site, I wanted to run the pictures today to show that such an outrageous concept was actually being made. (Hey, it’s not a sequel, a remake or an adaptation of a comic book.)  Click on over for a look at a few more.

The iconic home featured in John Hughes’ 1980s classic comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is back in the news. Earlier this year, the Rose House and Pavilon in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, used in the film as the home of Ferris’s best friend Cameron and featured in a memorable scene involving a Ferrari, went on the market following the death of its owner, textile designer Frances Rose. Now several months later, Landmarks Illinois is reporting that the house’s unsold status may be making it a candidate for demolition.

Landmarks Illiinois reports the potential threat to the site as-

While the property is designated as a Highland Park landmark, several inquiries have been made regarding demolition of the house and a possible lot split. Local landmark designation is intended to protect historic properties, but some residents fear if the property does not sell, the city may permit demolition.

The Rose House was designed by A. James Speyer and built in 1957. A steel and glass pavilion that was built over a sloping ravine was added onto the property in 1974 to house Rose’s classic car collection. It was the pavilion that was featured in a scene from the climax of Hughes’s 1986 movie where a Ferrari goes skidding out of the pavilion’s glass walls into the ravine below.

The home is currently listed with Soethby’s Reality for a cool $2.3 million dollars. Even at that price tag, it seems a damn shame that a building with historical importance, both cinematically and architecturally, would be in such danger. Even putting the Ferris Bueller connection aside for a moment, the home is considered notable for its progressive design.

Landmark Illinois suggests that if you want to see the city of Chicago keep the property’s landmark protection in place, write to Chicago Mayor Michael D.Belsky at City Hall, 1707 St. John’s Ave., Highland Park, IL 60035 or vial email at hpmayorbelsky@gmail.com.

Get Him To The Greek, the film being spun-off from last year’s comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall featuring Russell Brand’s obnoxious rock and roller Aldous Snow, has been filming in Manhattan for the last several days. Yesterday, the production was in midtown’s Rockefeller Plaza to film a segment where Snow performs on NBC’s Today Show. (Click on any picture for a larger view.)

Despite the sweltering high70s/low 80s heat beating down on the city, Brand-as-Snow is decked out for the scene in a pair of leather pants, a black t-shirt and a green velor jacket. A scarf completes the ensemble. The plaza is filled with just enough extras to fill the shots. Many of them are attractive young women, understandable giving Snow’s stallion-like reputation. Three girls near the front wear t-shirts on which is emblazoned “I F***** Aldous Snow.”

Joining Brand for the film is Jonah Hill as Aaron, a young record intern (and different character from the one Hill played in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) tasked with getting the hard partying Snow to an important show at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, but of course, things do not go as planned. Based on what we observed at the filming yesterday, I would hazard a guess that the scene being shot comes close to the end of the film. Although shot out of order, here is an approximate reconstruction of how the scenes may fit together.

For some reason, Snow seems to have entered an experimental stage with his music, as a group of musicians with traditional African instruments. in a segment before the Today Show performance is to start, Hill’s character, with a stain on the right label of his suit jacket, approaches one of the musicians, asking if he knows the words to Snow’s song “African Dream.”

Later, Snow is beginning his performance on the Today Show, the aforementioned song “African Dream.” The tempo is slow and the music a mixture of psychedelica and African Rhythms. Aldous begins to sing-

I walked the mystic deserts to take pictures of the poor…

But for some reason, the song doesn’t seem to sit well with him and he signals his band to stop. He turns to the crowd and asks “Who wants to hear this song?” The crowd response indicates that they aren’t too enthused with this tune.

And with what seems to be a change of heart over something, Snow then tells the crowd ” I’d rather play a song from when I really liked what I did…”

With that, the band starts into a faster-tempoed rock number entitled “The Clap,” with lyrics that go something like this-

We got the clap!
You got the clap!
We took the rock,
And you took the crack!
Oh yeah—-!

We got the crack!
And you got the smack!
We got the yellows,
And you got the black!
Oh—-!

During the song, Snow bounces around on stage, at one point approaching a Today Show production assistant to have her sing “I got the clap!” on mic before she throws her cue cards in the air and dances around. Aaron also stands off to the side, dancing to the music and look far more relieved than he did in the previous scene with the musician from the band.

Below are several other pictures taken at yesterday’s filming-

Jonah Hill and GET HIM TO THE GREEK writer/director Nicholas Stoller share a laugh between set-ups.

Thanks to Derek McCauley for his help in assembling this story.

One of the best fan run movie events of the summer is coming up in just a few days- BlobFest!

Held at the very movie theater in the Philadelphia suburb of Phoenixville that was attacked by the gelatinous monster in the 1958 classic, BlobFest is a celebration of the film and all things great from the 1950s. The Fest kicks off Friday night with its annual Running Out Re-enactment, in which you can run for your life from the Blob, just like theater patrons did 1958! Plus, there’s costume and trivia contests, rockabilly music and classic cars at the day long street fair on Saturday. There’ll be four screenings of The Blob over the weekend, three of them paired up as double-features with Invasion Of The Saucer Men and 13 Ghosts. (And we’ll be tweeting the event as well…)

For more information, check out FilmBuffOnLine’s The Blob Site.

Kevin Smith’s latest film, A Couple Of Dicks, started location shooting this week in New York City on Monday, and already the first photo of the production has hit online. The film stars Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan as police detectives who get tangled up with a sports memorabilia-obsessed gangster while trying to track down a stolen 1952 mint-condition baseball card. If you click on the photo on the left, courtesy of Accidental Sexiness, you can see the film crew reflected in Bruce Willis’s sunglasses.

When a film goes on location, the police generally post a load of temporary “No Parking” signs around the area to leave room on the street for production trucks and cast trailers. However, the signs that are being spotted around filming in Brooklyn are sporting the title A Couple Of Cops. While the Cops subsitution was briefly being considered to help the film secure a PG-13 rating, the film is definitely going to sport the Dicks monicker. The change of name is probably just a bit of sleight-of-hand to help ease location access.

Meanwhile, Coming Soon scored a picture featuring Tracy Morgan riding an oversized tricycle in a giant, foam cell phone costume being chased by a pitbull. I have no idea how that fits into the movie. Though the script has been sitting on my harddrive ever since it was named to the 2008 Black List, I’ve been hesitant to give it a read. The film is the first that Smith has directed that he has not written, so it should be interesting to see how he handles another writer’s material. How he manages will be for everyone to discover on February 26, 2010.

Via SlashFilm.

A film crew for controversial documentarian Michael Moore was in Wilkes-Barre, PA last week, conducting interviews for what is presumed to be his upcoming, untitled documentary. The crew were interviewing people who were involved in the recent Luzerne County Courthouse scandal involving county judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. accepting $2.6 million from two privately owned juvenile detention centers in exchange for helping secure county contracts worth $30 million.

Moore was not present during the shooting.

Up until now, all we knew about Moore’s film was that it was to be “a look at the global financial crisis and the U.S. economy during the transition between the incoming Obama Administration and the outgoing Bush Administration,” as its IMDb logline puts it.

It is understandable that the scandal, which made national news when it broke earlier this year, is something that Moore would be interested. Private prisons have certainly been a growing business over the last ten years, thanks in part to the ongoing Republican drive to pare down the size of government, outsourcing certain services to the private sector.

Ciaveralla and another Luzerne County judge, Michael Conahan, are currently awaiting trial after admitting that they convicted hundreds of juvenile defendants and sentancing them to privately run detention facilities in exchange for kickbacks. The two are currently facing up to seven years in prison, while a class action law suit is being organized on behalf of the children falsely convicted.

Privately run prisons have come under fire in recent years over their treatment of prisoners. One such company, the Geo Group, has come under fire for inmate deaths at several of its facilities.

Thanks to FBOL contributor John Gibbon for the tip on this story. Additional source material from the Hazleton (Pa) Standard Speaker.

Cameras begin rolling today, weather permitting, on M. Night Shyamalan’s live-action animae adaptation The Last Airbender on location in Reading, Pennsylvania. Roughly an hour north of the director’s hometown and favorite shooting location Philadelphia, Shyamalan will be making use of a local landmark called The Pagoda on top of Mount Penn as an exterior for his upcoming film.

The Pagoda will be used as an ancient temple in the film.

According to the Reading Eagle, locations scouts for the film were canvassing the area when their eyes were caught by the Pagoda. Once it was decided to use the location, a film company crew has spent the last several weeks making improvements to the road that accesses the site as well as burying electrical lines around the building.

I have to admit that this story caught my eye as I had spent many any hour hanging out around the Pagoda back when I attended nearby Kutztown University. (I also freelanced for the Reading Eagle for a semester, too.) It’s a lovely building, celebrating its centennial this year. (Click on the image at right for a larger view.) I’ve been to a lot of film locations, but it should be interesting to see a place with some strong personal memories appearing on screen in such a different context.

The Last Airbender, the first in a planned trilogy, is scheduled to hit theaters July 2, 2010.

Well, so far there have been no reports of the promised journalist visits to the set of the reshoots going on for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. However, while the production was doing some night shoots at the University of British Columbia a few nights ago, plenty of onlookers grabbed some photographs and have started posting them up online.

There’s not a whole lot to see, some explosions (like the one at left from Flickr user tyfn)and some barb-wire fences. I’m not sure if the production has shot at this location before, in which case they may be beefing up a previously filmed scene, or if this is a new location and a possible new scene added to the film.

You can check some other Wolverine location shooting photostreams at Flickr here, here, here and here.

Via SlashFilm.

A city is like a living, breathing entity in that it is constantly undergoing growth and change. Fortunately, films have helped capture the looks of certain locations at a specific moment in time, preserving them for future generations.

One of the changes currently being seen in many major metropolises is the disappearance of the phone booth. With the ever increasing use of the cell phone, the small, street corner glass and burnished metal cabinets where one could make a quick call have slowly been fading away to history.

And when it happens to the bank of pay phones behind the NYPD station in Manhattan’s Times Square, that means a small piece of movie history has also disappeared, for this was the bank of phones used by Robert DeNiro’s character Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s King Of Comedy.

According to a report over at Vanishing New York, the payphone bank where Pupkin once had his “office” has gone the way of so many other pay phones in the area. Now all that is there are some police barricades and a few patrol bicycles. Thankfully, directors like Scorsese were able to capture the feel of Manhattan in the 1970s giving us something to look back on as the city transmogrifies itself for the 21st century.

One upcoming film whose development I have been following closely has been the thriller Law Abiding Citizen. Set to be directed by Frank Darabont and starring Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx, it was scheduled top begin filming next month in Philadelphia.

That plan may be changing, however, as AintItCoolNews is reporting that Darabont left the film at some point last week and that it “apparently ended ugly.”

While, yes, I was interested and excited about this project filming close to where I live, I have also been interested in this due to Darabont being at the helm. I am finding myself more drawn to his work as both a writer and director the more I explore it. I had high hopes that he would inject some interesting things into the film’s story of a man (Foxx) who sets out to extract revenge on the man who killed his wife and daughter as well as the ambitious assistant district attorney (Butler) who set up the plea bargain that let him go free.

What effect Darabont’s departure from the project will have is as yet unknown. I, myself, was on the phone with the Greater Philadelphia Film Office in the middle of last week attempting to get some details on when location shooting was scheduled to begin, and they were still working under the assumption that everything was set for a mid-November start. If the film’s production company, the newly launched Film Department, want to make that schedule, they will have to bring someone on board quickly.

But what challenges does a new director face in trying to meet that deadline? Obviously, they already have their two leads cast, so unless either Foxx or Butler decide to walk with Darabont, that part is taken care of. However, if the production is committed to filming in Philadelphia, it seems that some of their work regarding location scouting and such, might have already been done for them. With such factors narrowing down their own creative input, I don’t see a director being able to imprint a strong personal vision on the story. I would not be surprised if Film Department were on the look out for somebody competent enough to point the cameras in the right direction and just get the film made as expediently as possible. Anyone know if Brett Ratner has some free time?