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All Rights Reserved,
PG web design
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Wednesday
July 23, 2003
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It's
Official: Britney Spears Movie Still On
As
reported yesterday on MotorsportsTV.com, NASCAR and Britney Spears Productions
have confirmed that the NASCAR-themed movie starring Britney Spears is still
on.
Here
is the official statement from Britney Spears Productions:
"The
film production company formed by Britney Spears with Larry Rudolph and Ann
Carli -- announced today that, contrary to recent rumors, their NASCAR themed
feature film project is alive and well.
The movie, titled Trading Paint, has been developed specifically for Spears.
She is attached to co-star and also to produce. Ann Carli, who also produced
Spears' first film project Crossroads, expressed amusement at the rumors.
'Britney herself was surprised to hear that she had allegedly said she would
not be making the movie,' said Carli. 'We have a wonderful script by Jim Hart
and we are concluding our financing. We'll be announcing our choice of
director shortly.'
Trading Paint was written by James V. Hart (Contact, Bram Stoker's Dracula,
Tomb Raider, The Cradle of Life). Carli also says, 'There was never a plan for
Spears to play a driver. Her role has always been, as was announced last
summer, to play the daughter of the head of a NASCAR racing dynasty.' The
story is about a NASCAR driver who drops out of racing under mysterious
circumstances. Spears' character uses her knowledge and experience in the
family business to help him return to racing."
motorsportstv.com |
Last Call for Rudolph & Beer Law Firm
Entertainment law firm Rudolph &
Beer, whose clients have included such pop acts as Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync
and Britney Spears, will shut its doors at the end of the month after a decade
in business.
Founding partner Larry Rudolph will
launch a new artist management unit -- ReignDeer Entertainment -- which will
handle Spears and singer Nick Lachey exclusively. Co-founder Steven Beer will
segue to multinational law firm Greenberg Traurig as a shareholder and head of
its film practice.
Rudolph also is a principal in
Spears' production outfit, Britney Spears Prods.
Rudolph & Beer launched in 1993
and racked up a long list of burgeoning pop-star clients along the way,
including Spears, Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, Aaron Carter, Nick Carter, 98* and
O-Town, as well as rap acts DMX, Wu-Tang Clan, Rakim, Keith Murray and the
Sugar Hill Gang.
The firm's clients also included
director Barbara Kopple, actor Rosario Dawson, model Linda Evangelista and MTV
host Quddus, as well as indie film outfits Lot 47, Myriad Pictures and Solaris
Entertainment. Beer said Monday that he expects to take his client roster with
him to Greenberg Traurig.
Rudolph's ReignDeer will be handling
exclusive management of Spears and Lachey, as well as co-management of
recording artists Dream and Nikki Cleary. Bryan Spears -- Britney Spears'
older brother -- will share offices with ReignDeer and will rep the Spears
family interests, as well as exploring entrepreneurial ventures with Rudolph.
Beer will head up the New York film
practice at Greenberg Traurig starting Aug. 1. The firm's entertainment and
media department has more than 40 lawyers in broadcast, music, film and
digital media and has 975 attorneys overall in 20 offices internationally.
Rudolph executive-produced Spears'
first feature vehicle, "Crossroads," and is producing MTV's reality
show "The Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica," starring married pop stars
Lachey and Jessica Simpson. He also is helping Spears build a television
production company, through which Rudolph will executive produce
"Holly," a two-hour back-door pilot for ABC Family.
"Holly" is based on the book "A Mother's Gift," by Britney
and Lynne Spears.
Other TV projects slated under the
Spears banner include an animated TV series on cable outlet Noggin and a
syndicated talk show called "Blend."
Last year, Rudolph and Spears Prods.
forged a category-exclusive agreement with NASCAR to develop and produce a
dramatic ensemble film set in the racing world.
story.news.yahoo.com |
W Magazine: The Complete Truth
Most of her contemporaries may have
traded in their tube tops for corporate uniforms, but Britney Spears is still
looking very much like Britney Spears—which, for a woman of 21, is a little
alarming. Even with 50 million records sold, Spears should be quaking in her
candy pink, jewel-encrusted Skechers right about now. With her ex-boyfriend
Justin Timberlake riding the success of a hit solo album and touring this
summer with Christina Aguilera, teen pop seems to be having a more
sophisticated second coming—without her. After a somewhat narrow evolution
across three albums—from corruptible schoolgirl to dazed, wholesome Southern
stripper, and with a glimmer of something edgier and more expansive on her
third effort, Britney—Spears has no choice but to push past the middle
ground she sang about in her last hit single, the growing-pains ballad “Not
a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”
But in a quadruplex apartment on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan—a
dozen flights up from a sea of NYU undergrads, many of whom helped drive the
teen-pop phenomenon of the late nineties—Britney Spears is her not-so-old
familiar self: the iconic girl-woman, sprightly and almost frighteningly
perfect looking (more so in person than on TV), with blooming skin and big,
sparkling eyes buried somewhere under a jailbait smear of dark mascara.
She’s decked out in classic Britney-wear: a dramatically cropped
black-and-white striped halter top and, below seven golden inches of midriff,
baggy black pants held up by black and pink suspenders. There’s an oversize
white Patricia Field baseball cap on her head and a long rhinestone pendant
hanging from her navel. (She does not, like a few of her rivals for Billboard
domination, go in for Fred Leighton bling bling.)
Don’t be fooled, though: The new Britney is currently being forged at a
studio in the Flower District—and that’s where Spears has been all day,
hard at work on her fourth album. “This whole album has been a huge
experiment for me,” she says, settling into a lawn chaise on her
terrace—then falling right through to the floor as the cushion gives way.
“Rental,” she notes with a laugh that she’s never afraid to direct at
herself. “Everyone I’d go work with, they have this perception, this
vision of me, and a lot of times I’m like, ugh! It took me a while to figure
out the right vibe and find producers who really got me. I’m nervous. I’m
excited, but whoa!”
Recording artists feel a constant pressure to maintain what the folks at
Spears’s label, Jive Records, call Q-factor: the burst of commercial heat at
the outset of a singer’s career. No one has had more Q-factor than Spears,
but she seems to understand, young as she is, that pop stars age in dog years
and that she’ll need some new tricks if she wishes to snatch her crown back
from the 18-year-old Canadian anti-Britney, Avril Lavigne. “I f---in’ love
Avril’s stuff,” Spears insists. “It f---in’ rocks.” But she goes on
to reveal a touch of competitiveness. “Avril doesn’t really dance, but
whatever. It’s weird. My third album sold as much as her first one, which is
very funny to me because everyone thought it didn’t do that great.” It’s
clear, in any case, that Spears’s new record, which debuts in late October,
will either carry her closer to that pop Valhalla whose only current spirit is
Madonna, or prove with a decisive stroke that the bubble of bubblegum pop has
finally burst.
Spears prefers not to overponder her place in the pop pantheon. “It’s not
that deep,” she says, laughing, as she extends her fingernails to a
manicurist who has suddenly appeared on the terrace. She is not quite the
apple pie she seemed nearly five years ago, and yet there’s no specific
career gambit—no obscure force other than the force of adolescent
development—working to make Spears into a more complex and sophisticated
act. Still, the turning point in her career seems all the more noteworthy at a
moment when some critics are beginning to wonder whether Madonna has finally
lost her edge.
“Madonna, over?” Spears shrieks, incredulous. (Heightened emotion tightens
the twang in her Louisiana accent.) Then she reflects for a moment.
“Honestly, that’s why I work so hard—because that’s a fear I have for
me,” she says. She pauses and swills her Red Bull. “There are always gonna
be people that don’t love you, and actually, I kind of like the people like
Madonna, who makes such a statement that people either love her or hate her. I
don’t want to be in between. I think that’s boring.”
Only the most jaded tabloid reader would be bored by accounts of Spears’s
life over the past few years. Her two-year relationship with Timberlake was
the most famous musical coupling since Kurt and Courtney, and she has clearly
been wounded by the breakup and the ensuing media storm. “The most painful
thing I’ve ever experienced was that breakup,” she says. “We were
together so long and I had this vision. You think you’re going to spend the
rest of your life together. Where I come from, the woman is the homemaker, and
that’s how I was brought up—you cook for your kids. But now I realize I
need my single time. You have to do your own thing: be self-loving, you know.
I know it sounds cliché and cheesy, but I really believe that if it’s meant
to be, it’s meant to be.”
For a young woman whose avowed virginity has been examined under the media
microscope, Spears is surprisingly frank about Timberlake. “I’ve only
slept with one person my whole life,” she asserts—shattering the dirty
dreams of Humbert Humberts everywhere and veering at long last from the
oft-repeated soapbox talk about no sex before marriage. “It was two years
into my relationship with Justin, and I thought he was the one.” She pauses
and her voice leaps an octave. “But I was wrong! I didn’t think he was
gonna go on Barbara Walters and sell me out.”
Spears, as every amateur pop-culture critic knows, has mastered a kind of
in-your-face sexuality that seems to hedge in the same hot breath. She has
worn a nude body stocking onstage and talked about her prayer diary in
interviews; she has sung about how she’s “not that innocent” while
regularly inveighing against premarital sex. “It’s an
oscillation—that’s what she’s done so adeptly,” says Barry Weiss,
president of Jive Records. “Britney’s a good girl, but when the mike comes
on in the studio, she becomes a vixen. Music literally transforms her. It’s
a wild thing to watch.” That’s the erotic charade mounted by most child
stars, who peak before they become consenting adults, and then find themselves
frozen, as adults, in childhood.
“The fun thing about my new album is there was a sneak peek of sexuality on
Britney, but on this one I can kind of go there a little more, push the
envelope a little bit,” she adds, then raises her voice. “But it’s not
tacky! It’s kind of sensually done. I think when things are too much in your
face, then there’s no subtlety in it.” She pauses, backpedaling. “Tacky
can be fun, though, sometimes.”
True enough, but the moment calls for something a bit more cosmopolitan. The
photos accompanying this article suggest that it is J.Lo, after all, whom the
grown-up Spears may be looking to emulate. “I love J.Lo,” she says.
“I’m totally inspired by her. The whole put-together thing is usually
where I’m a little off, though. I don’t like it so contrived. Normally I
just do the tight jeans and the little shirt, whatever. But sometimes I want
to wear a sequined dress and be a freakin’ girl! W is all about seeing
yourself in a goddess sense, so I totally wanted to go there.” Which isn’t
to say she’s not still Britney. “Honestly, though,” she hastens to add,
“if everyone thinks I’m gonna come out and be a woman, they’re wrong.”
Along with a heightened glam factor, the new album finds Spears making a more
ambitious use of heavyweight producers (or, more accurately, composers). Their
role can’t be underestimated, and in Spears’s case, nearly every big name
in the business lobbied for a piece of the pie. She stayed away from the
ubiquitous Neptunes—who fashioned her house-inflected hit “I’m a Slave 4
U”—instead giving Redzone, an Atlanta collective, an opportunity with a
few thumping dance songs that define the up-tempo feel of the album. Spears is
especially pleased with the collaboration: her words, their rhythms.
“They’re the first people I’ve ever worked with where it’s like I’m
listening to it off the radio,” she says. “Where I’m, like, yeah! I’m
jamming…with myself. And it’s weird. I’ve never done that before.” The
record is also likely to include tracks by Metro, the English producers
responsible for Cher’s nightmarishly successful single “Believe,” and
the Matrix, engineers of Avril Lavigne’s biggest hits. P.Diddy and Moby have
also weighed in. “The song we did is kind of brooding and atmospheric,”
Moby writes in an e-mail. “It’s very simple and, for lack of a better
word, sexy.”
A far cry, certainly, from the rousing version of Sinéad O’Connor’s
“Nothing Compares 2 U” that a nine-year-old Spears once offered from the
family trampoline in Kentwood, Louisiana (population 2,500). By that age,
Spears had proven herself such a determined performer that her mother, Lynne
Spears, decided to say goodbye to Kentwood and bring her daughter to New York
to attend the Professional Performing Arts School. Within a year Britney had
landed a part in an off-Broadway play and won a Star Search competition. Then
at age 11 she moved to Orlando, Florida, to join future teen-pop stars Justin
Timberlake and Christina Aguilera on TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club. “That was
the best childhood experience you could possibly have in your whole life,”
she says. “I mean, you live in Disney World!” A few years later, the
Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls were saturating the airwaves, and Spears
landed a contract.
“I would have gone nuts in a classroom,” she says. “That wasn’t for
me. I started homeschooling after the eighth grade, and I didn’t experience
a real high-school thing. I think, when I went through a little party phase
last year, it was because I didn’t get a chance in high school to party—to
go out and be stupid.”
Which is a shame, since Spears loves to be goofy. She burps before offering a
ladylike “Excuse me,” snorts when she laughs, loves to put on silly
accents, and says things just because they sound funny to her. “Why do I
keep saying ‘in the hizzy?’” she asks, giggling. “I don’t know what
it means. It’s like my ghetto form or something.” (Fans of Snoop Dogg will
know that it’s hip-hop slang for “in the house.”)
“She’s 21, and that’s what people forget,” says her best friend, Jenny
Morris, who may sing backup during Spears’s next tour. “We joke about it
all the time—she always says, ‘If they only knew what a big dork I am.’
She loves to poke fun at herself. I think she honestly forgets how big her
life really is.”
The media also tend to gloss over Spears’s youth when they catalog her
barroom escapades: Stories about Britney getting sloshed and dancing on tables
have made New York tabloid headlines ever since she began spending more time
in the city just over a year ago. She swears the truth is less interesting.
“I wish my life were like that!” she says. “Honestly, I would much
rather go to Crunch or lie in my tub and look at the bubbles.” Really,
Britney? “Well, there was one night three weeks ago. I didn’t dance on the
table—it was the sofa. And everybody was standing up, the whole club was,
and I stood up for a few seconds, and so now I’m a wild girl and I stand on
tables. Julia Roberts, she did that too! Listen to me, I’m venting. Yes she
did—hell, yeah!”
It’s hard not to believe Spears when she insists the press has embellished
her wild side, if only because—these days, at least—she makes so little
effort to hide her less demure behavior. “I was never hiding anything,”
she says, holding up her pink, rhinestone-paved Versace lighter to a cigarette
and shrugging when asked why the tabloids made such a fuss recently over her
smoking. “It was the people around me that were hiding me. The publicists
would call me and they were like, ‘Oh, my God. This was in the newspaper.’
And I’m like, ‘Cool.’ I mean, what are you going to do? I think if I sat
there and tried to hide it, it would look kind of stupid. Honestly, because I
know I’m not supposed to do it, it makes me want to do it.”
And as for her sex life, Spears has some news that may cause a national
outbreak of chest-beating. American boys (and Fred Durst especially) aren’t
really her thing anymore; Spain and Australia, she says, boast the most
alluring and least “fuddy-duddy” men. Oh, and Ireland—via Hollywood. The
Colin Farrell rumors were true, she acknowledges: “Yes, I kissed him. Of
course I did! He’s the cutest, hottest thing in the world—wooh! He’s
such a bad boy. But it was nothing serious.” Since Farrell, her needs have
gotten even more basic. “Seriously, I haven’t had a boy in a really long
time, and I’m really craving…just a kiss, man. Just a kiss would be
nice.”
Just a kiss? Now that the innocent act has supposedly gone the way of glitter
makeup and Spears seems rather like the woman she threatened to be at age 17,
a sweet little peck sounds almost regressive. Indeed, she has a big chance
right now to emulate her professed idol, Madonna, by redefining
herself—sharpening the talent, tightening the image and reflecting the
emotions of her grown-up fans. It was Madonna, after all, who said Spears had
been a victim of the same snobbery with which she was greeted in the
eighties—and if Madonna has had the last laugh, so can she.
Spears clearly relishes another chance to defy her critics. “If the
record’s good—if it’s hot and you see the video and we’re working it,
it’s basically saying the F-you to everyone out there,” she says. “And I
think that’s cool."
style.com |
Spears: "I Love My Food"
Pop beauty Britney Spears often fears
she's putting on too much weight - but she loves food too much to cut down.
The stunning Oops I Did it Again star - who's often been hailed as having one
of the most beautiful bodies in the world - insists she is not happy with her
appearance all the time.
She says, "I judge myself sometimes, just like anyone else, when I'm
having an off day. I'll think, 'Maybe I should be a little slimmer.'
"But then, I'm certainly not the type of person who can starve
themselves. I love my food and I have to eat well."
And the pop vixen isn't entirely about some of her features either.
She adds, "My feet are ugly! And I hate my nose - it's really big! I hate
it!"
teenmusic.com |
Love's Second Thoughts On Britney
Collaboration
Courtney Love's proposed collaboration
with Britney Spears is under threat - the rocker is unsure whether the pop
star could interpret her lyrics correctly.
The former Hole frontwoman, who has just finished recording her debut solo
album America's Sweetheart, commented last month she was considering giving
some of her surplus material to Britney, who is attempting to revamp her
squeaky-clean image on her upcoming LP.
However, despite being turned onto the idea by her song-writing partner Linda
Perry - who has worked with Christina Aguilera and Pink - Love is scared of
her lyrics being misinterpreted by the 21-year-old.
She explains, "I'm looking for new artists to write for. Linda tells me
Britney is looking for some rock. She passed on it. I'm thinking I probably
would too.
"Not to be snobby but what's the point of giving up my lyrics to someone
who may not give a s***?
"I remember doing Top of the Pops (British music show) with All Saints
covering (RRed Hot Chili Peppers' drug lament) Under the Bridge. Those girls
thought it was a love song and didn't care and hadn't asked. That freaks me
out."
teenmusic.com
|
Spears Of Influence
Last August, when Britney Spears announced a hiatus from the music business, her
detractors enjoyed a snigger or two. She's finished, they chuckled, a washed-up
hotpants diva whose simmering harlot act had overstayed its welcome. The
teen-pop craze seemed, at the time, fatally wounded and a few heartbeats from a
bright pink toe tag.
And if this corpse were buried, well, that'd be the end of Ms Spears, wouldn't
it? By January, an 18-year-old Canadian lass named Avril Lavigne was being
hailed as the Britney-slayer, lauded for writing her own songs, playing an
instrument and dressing in anti-showbiz, unslutty duds, such as T-shirts and
jeans. A new era of substance seemed to be dawning, an era that would wipe away
all the froth that had so enraptured 12-year-olds for so long.
Thanks for playing our game, Miss Midriff. Don't let the door hit your career on
the way out.
But 11 months after announcing her hiatus, look who's laughing. True to her
word, Spears hasn't released any music lately, but the world of female singers
is today more Spearsified than ever. The Britney Brigade just keeps growing. And
here's the funniest part: few of these recruits belong in this army.
Remember when Jewel was a preachy folk poet who wondered "who will
sa-aa-aa-ve your soul"? She's been rah-rahed off the field by a perky
cheerleader with a mesh shirt that doesn't cover her bellybutton. On her latest,
0304, Jewel regresses to the mentality of a high school student, her do-gooder
sentimentality buried under mechanised beats and the Abba-esque group harmonies
that are pop's favourite cliche.
"If you want me let me know/I promise I won't say no," she sings on
Intuition, a tune that could have been an out-take from Spears's Oops! ... I Did
It Again sessions. Jewel even resorts in the liner notes to instant-message
glyphs ("Would U like 2 come along?") and brings aboard a producer
named Lester Mendez, whose previous credits include work with the Spice Girls
and Shakira.
All this is so shocking that 0304 comes with an explanation. "This record
may seem different to you," she writes in the liners. "To me, it's
close to what's been in my head for years." What, you thought she was
mulling the Greenpeace agenda all this time? Nope. Britney is the soundtrack to
Jewel's life.
Jewel isn't the only singer doing back-handsprings. Liz Phair took five years
off from fame and emerged with a decidedly grit-free, sunny rock album. You'd
think a single mum of 36 would have some grown-up things on her mind, but within
a minute of the album opener, Extraordinary, Phair is offering to demonstrate
her love-worthiness by jumping into a car and running stop signs in the buff.
Four of the 14 tracks - including Extraordinary - were co-penned by the Matrix,
a Los Angeles songwriting trio that writes three-minute pop songs to artists
such as the Backstreet Boys and Lavigne. (Yes, it turns out she doesn't really
write her songs, either.)
The Matrix excel at what they do, but they sell a formula that Phair's long-time
fans would be surprised to learn she's buying. This is the woman who in 1993
released Exile in Guyville, a sexually blunt album intended as a song-for-song
answer to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. Guyville is idiosyncratic
and raunchy enough to seem like the work of just one febrile and highly original
imagination. Not true of Phair's new album. It sounds a bit like Lavigne after
five beers and a couple of heartbreaks.
Jewel and Phair might have been cribbing, in part, from the notes of Sheryl
Crow, whose last album, C'mon, C'mon, was released before Spears's cool-off
period began. On C'mon, Crow resisted the urge to act her age - 40, at the time
- and let rip a rock album for gals half her age.
As a sales gambit, it paid off. Crow's album went platinum. Jewel's has done
well, too, rising to No. 2 in the US and lounging in the Top 20 a month after
its release. It's too soon to tell about Phair's album - she's never been a
chart-buster. But even if it's lucrative, there's something striking about the
apparently endless, Spears-ward lean in female pop. It has yet to generate a
backlash.
Typically, when the musical Zeitgeist languishes in the fluff realm for a while,
something brainier launches a counterattack. After the early '60s reign of the
Brill Building songwriters, when Matrix-like teams wrote for
all-but-interchangeable singers, artists such as the Beatles and Bob Dylan
arrived and made vocalists who didn't write their own material seem like
lightweights.
It's a pattern so consistent you can view the history of pop as a non-stop bout
for the upper hand, with producers, songwriters and impresarios in one corner
and singer-songwriters in the other. The former have been in control for years
now, at least on the female side.
So even if Spears's next album bombs - there are reports she's collaborating
with, who else, the Matrix - those eulogies back in August seem pretty silly.
She has won. And all efforts to out-Spears her are doomed to fail because she
does herself better than anyone. If you're looking for a heroine to sa-aa-aa-ve
pop's soul, your wait could be a long one.
washingtonpost.com
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Britney On The Lycos Top 50: Week 205
Britney moves up one spot this week to
#6 on the Lycos 50 for the week ending 07/19/03. She has been on the list for
205 weeks.
50.lycos.com |
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© 2001, All Rights Reserved, PG web design
