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10/15/2010 12:49 AM
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10/15/2010 9:58 AM
classexa wrote:
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10/15/2010 11:40 PM
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10/16/2010 5:12 AM
He used to call it his "hobby". Many of us might read, play football or fish, but for Justin Timberlake, Grammy-winning, multi-platinum pop star, his hobby was acting in Hollywood movies. He couldn't just stick to golf (though he's good at that, too).
The self-deprecating description was probably sensible, taking the pressure of expectation off his appearances in films as varied as indie sizzler Black Snake Moan to animated cash cow Shrek The Third. After all, the one-time Disney kid could have expected to see his screen ambitions dismissed as a Mickey Mouse endeavour, although you wouldn't want to mention this to his face. Not because â as with previous singer-actors, from Frank Sinatra to Mark Wahlberg â you'd be worried about getting a smack but because, well, he's just so damn nice.
"Hey, how's it going? I'm Justin." He strolls over and shakes hands, on location for his latest movie, The Social Network. He doesn't know a journalist is on set, just spots an unfamiliar face, talking with the crew, and decides to say hello. Diva, he ain't.
Segueing from the teenybopper frenzy of boyband 'NSync to fully fledged solo stardom â 17m records sold and counting, plus a successful producing career â he has never lost the aura of being wholesome. Evenripping off Janet Jackson's top at the Superbowl in 2004 â the so-called "wardrobe malfunction" â didn't tarnish this. He's polite, well-dressed, and he's nice to his mom, Lynn Harless, whose management company plays on his name: Just-In Time Entertainment.
His past squeezes include Cameron Diaz and fellow Mickey Mouse Club alumnus Britney Spears, but Mom recently gushed publicly about his currently girlfriend, A-Team star Jessica Biel, who pops along during shooting to watch Timberlake act under direction from David Fincher. Working with cinema's Prince Of Darkness (Seven, Zodiac) is definitely a step up for the Prince of Pop. "David is without doubt one of my film-making heroes," says Timberlake. "I think Fight Club is a perfect movie, a perfect movie. I've taken this very seriously, getting to work with such a great talent, you know?" The result is his best performance, by a distance, in a film Rolling Stone praised as, "The movie of the year that also brilliantly defines the decade." With a script by The West Wing's Aaron Sorkin, based on the story of the creation of Facebook, The Social Network is a zeitgeist-nailing, heavyweight Oscar-favourite. And it cements a suspicion that has been growing for some time: Justin Timberlake really is, like, a proper actor.
There's a delicious irony in his casting, too: he's playing Sean Parker, the man whose co-creation of free, peer-to-peer download site Napster shook the music industry in 1999. The movie has proved controversial, with arguments over how true it is in showing Parker befriending Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and driving a wedge between him and his best friend and chief investor Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). The truth, though, is slippery. Take Parker's story, recounted to Vanity Fair, of meeting Timberlake at a club: "He said he wanted to get to know me, but I said, 'That isn't going to help you play the part Sorkin has written. That character really isn't me.'"
In contrast, Timberlake says he hadn't even been cast at that point. "It had sort of gotten blasted out across the internet that the movie was being made," he says. "And it had been speculated that I was being cast, but it wasn't official. It was an interesting time. I ran into him in New York and spoke to him for probably no longer than three minutes, but he was really nice. I kind of wished that I would have met him later, because I would have had more to talk about, but it was sort of a serendipitous thing. We just said hello and he wished us all the best of luck, though I couldn't actually accept it because I wasn't officially cast yet!" He repeats his positive point (naturally): "He seemed like a really nice guy."
Timberlake snared Fincher's attention through his supporting part in Alpha Dog and guest stints on Saturday Night Live, which showed him to be "fearless". The director also saw a quality in Timberlake that stemmed from his musical day job. "You know, the script describes Parker as sort of Sinatra-like," says Fincher, "and we had a lot of really talented actors come in to read for this, because it's a fun part, and a lot of people had the chops. But Sean Parker, for our movie â I don't know what he's like in real life â has to be one of those guys who knows, 'If I take you and I introduce you to this person, what comes of it is this thing where I can take credit.' You know what I mean? So Justin's experiences as a record producer â how he perceives talent, where it can go, what it can do for him â he just innately understood that."
Timberlake still had to go through a rigorous auditioning process before he was cast, a contrast, perhaps, to his dominant position in pop. "To be honest as a musician I've fought for everything I've ever gotten as well, so they're actually very similar," he says, with just a trace of defensiveness. "I find that there is always someone who is sort of around to tell you that you should be doing something a different way, but the difference here is it's David Fincher and I trust every instinct he has. So the process of making this film, versus having the responsibility of putting together a project like a record or a tour, was actually less weighty. It was a lot easier to give up and submit.
"You put yourself in his hands," the 29-year-old continues, drifting into an American football metaphor. "We're not quarterbacks, you know, we're not forwards, we're linebackers and it's like, 'Do the play this way, now do the play this way, now do the play this way!' That's sort of the quick â actually, really shitty â analogy, that I could give. But it really is like that. I think we all respect David so much that, you know, you sort of just want to please him."
Late at night, his on screen scene completed, Timberlake remains to read off-camera lines to Eisenberg. In a baseball cap, blue jeans, Technics T-shirt and thick-rimmed glasses, he's stylishly understated â keeping his head down, working hard. There's something reassuringly retro about him. Though there are various adoring tributes on Facebook, Timberlake is not on the site; his tastes in communication run a little more old-school.
"Postcards are good," he smiles. "Postcards are like the original text messages." He's having plenty of chance to send them, with a state-hopping shooting schedule. Comedy Bad Teacher, co-starring Cameron Diaz, is in the can, romcom Friends With Benefits is shooting now, and upcoming he has an untitled sci-fi drama from Andrew Niccol, writer of The Truman Show. Timberlake isn't abandoning his other career, but it seems the demands of movie studios could keep him out of the music one for a while. He knows, though, that questions about his next album, his next tour, will always be there, whatever he's working on. "On this, I taught some of the grips how to dance a little bit!" he laughs. He's not serious. Except about the acting.
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10/24/2010 8:05 PM
Best FanFic Writer '09
10/24/2010 11:06 PM
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10/25/2010 12:28 AM
songinmyheart wrote: Justin didn't have to lose weight to look younger.Do you think he still doesn't get that when he shaves, he looks 19? Lol
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10/27/2010 9:56 AM
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10/27/2010 9:59 AM
10/28/2010 3:05 PM
E HAS ruled the pop charts and won truckloads of Grammys â now Justin Timberlake wants Hollywood stardom and he wants it bad.
But the 29-year-old is the first to admit he has a misconception mountain to conquer â that whole boy band, Britney-lover, Cry Me a River thing.
âPeople seem to find if you do one thing really well there is no way you can do something else,â he says.
âYou get a lot of doubt.â
Any questions about his acting potential, however, have been silenced by The Social Network. In the film, about the birth of Facebook, Timberlake plays Napster creator and Silicon Valley hedonist Sean Parker.
Parker himself declared of Timberlakeâs turn in the film: âItâs a great performance of a character that isnât meâ.
The moment he read the script, Timberlake didnât just want, but needed the part.
âItâs not every day you read something so complete and so dazzling,â he says. âI was blown away. It was almost dizzying. I asked to be able to please get into the audition room.â
Once in the room, he faced a battle of nerves triggered by the presence of director David Fincher (Se7en) and writer Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing).
âThe most nerve-wracking part I didnât account for was walking in and sitting with Aaron reading the dialogue with him,â Timberlake says.
âItâs like Paul Simon wrote a song for you and you have to walk in and sing it right in front of him. In a childlike way I was just enamoured with them. I will say this: you benefit yourself as an actor by saying what Aaron wrote.â
Sorkin and Fincher, on the other hand, did their best to dismiss Timberlake as just another pop idol desperate to act. Once word had spread through Hollywood that the Sorkin-Fincher dream-team was at the helm of the Facebook movie, they were swamped âwith hundreds and hundredsâ of young male actors wanting in. âWe had our pick,â Fincher says.
Zombielandâs Jesse Eisenberg was picked to play Facebook figurehead Mark Zuckerberg. English actor Andrew Garfield, who has since been crowned Spider-Man, came on board as Zuckerbergâs business partner Eduardo Saverin.
The writer and director then put Timberlake through a rigorous series of auditions, but each time, his talent blew them away.
âJustin Timberlake had to overcome his own fame to get a part in the movie,â Sorkin says.
âWe were putting together the best ensemble cast of young actors. Justin is a worldwide mega pop star who was upsetting that apple cart.
âEven though every time he came in to audition he was greater than the time before, no one had to work harder to get this part than Justin did. We kept calling him in to audition in the hope he would do something that would finally make us feel good about saying, âYouâre not going to get the partâ.
âBut that never happened. He kept making a more and more convincing case.â
Timberlake the superstar quickly fades into Sean Parker in The Social Network â in all the internet mogulâs self-sabotaging, paranoid glory.
âI met him briefly,â Timberlake says of bumping into Parker in a LA club. âWhen I met him I hadnât been cast.
âI saw the character as it existed in the script. I think it would be irresponsible to place all of that on him as a person because I donât know him.
âI want to be clear that I didnât play him as a person. That would have been lazy as an actor. You have to be imaginative after the relative.â
Wearing a pair of intellectual but expensive glasses and a navy blue suit jacket â âItâs by my friend J. Lindberg,â he says â Timberlake is the definition of geek chic.
Yet, while his Saturday Night Live spoofs have notched millions of YouTube views, when it comes to the latest technology, Timberlake likes to keep it old-school.
He is âtoo busyâ to use Facebook, is on Twitter rarely and prefers the old-fashioned telephone to connect with his friends â who he says he can count âon one handâ.
âSocial networking is the new rock ânâ roll,â he says. âIt affords kids the time to waste. Iâm so thankful I wasnât in my youth anymore when it was invented. But when youâre young, youâre young and you find ways to waste time.
âI look at it as an outsider who doesnât use it that much and wonder how good or how bad it will be in the end. I donât think it will ever stop.â
Timberlake has little time to waste poking people online.
He has just filmed the comedy Bad Teacher with his former flame Cameron Diaz, lead the rom-com Friends With Benefits and will be the voice of Boo-Boo Bear in next yearâs Yogi Bear movie.
âI could have done a movie about some guy who used his singing voice to save the world or something stupid,â he says.
âBut when I started off as a kid I started as a sketch comedy actor. More than I was a singer, acting came more naturally to me. Acting was my first job.â
Even SexyBack JT was a construct, he says.
âFutureSex/LoveSounds was a character. It was a fun thing to do on stage. Whatever personality or bravado came out of that was acting.
âI started off in a TV show and I honestly feel luckier to have become a musician because I didnât think that would ever pan out for me.â
10/29/2010 5:06 PM
If he hadnât been selling millions of records when Napster came along, Justin Timberlake thinks he might have been one of its users. Napster was a web service allowing music fans to rip and exchange their own recordings without observing the niceties of royalties and copyrights, and it inspired a celebrated court battle with users charged as thieves and pirates.
âWhen Napster hit the scene, I was 19 or 20,â he told me. âI had mixed feelings about it because I was the same age as all of those college kids that ended up playing the role of defendants in court. Had I not been in the music industry, I probably would have used it. At the same time, I was watching friends in the industry who were songwriters and were forced take up new jobs. All they do is write songs. They donât have endorsement deals or sold-out shows. They were getting a small piece of the collective pie.â
There is an irony, then, to be found in Timberlake playing the role of Sean Parker, the mercurial founder of Napster, in David Fincherâs âThe Social Network,â one of this yearâs Academy Award front-runners. The movie is based on the story of Mark Zuckerberg, who launched Facebook as a Harvard undergraduate and soon saw it become a phenomenon. The real Parker had a similar experience with Napster, and materialized in Zuckerbergâs life as a Svengali of the fast lane.
âThe Social Networkâ is on all the lists of Oscar contenders, and Timberlake is often mentioned as a best supporting actor candidate. Justin Timberlake? The perennial Trending Topic on Twitter? Yes, and why not? In one of the best films of the year, he provides a crucial performance, and he does it with confidence, bravado and heedless energy. Itâs acting. It is also perhaps like nothing many Timberland watchers expected, but there you have it: Many performers have talents we never see, because they stay within the parameters of their early fame.
For Timberlake, fame was not launched at the Actorâs Studio or at Julliard, but on âStar Search,â when he was 11. That led to stardom of sorts on the Mickey Mouse Club, and then big time when he became the lead singer of âN Sync. Then he went solo and started winning Grammys and going platinum, and â well, nothing at that point could have predicted his casting as Sean Parker in âThe Social Network.â
Parker is a difficult role. Mark Zuckerberg is played by Jesse Eisenberg as a super-intelligent geek who likes to bash people in conversation. Parker sees him and raises him. This requires an actor with a lot of confidence and agility. Eisenberg, at 27, is very experienced. Timberlake, at 29, is new to the front ranks of feature films, with all due respect to âThe Love Guruâ and âBlack Snake Moan.â Yet he embodies the Parker role and sells it persuasively. His Parker is a devious manipulator with a private agenda and an instinct for personal openings. Heâs a spellbinder. The choice of Timberlake is not only good casting by David Fincher and his casting director, Laray Mayfield, but good casting out of left field.
The Zuckerberg-Parker exchanges are often in a rapid-fire tempo that evokes screwball comedies. I asked if that took a lot of rehearsal.
âOur rehearsal process was, in fact, all talking,â he said. âWe never once got up from the table. We would go through the scene, just reading it. Then David Fincher, [writer] Aaron Sorkin and the actors who were in the scene would just sit and talk about what our characters were looking to accomplish in each moment.
âFor a character like Sean, who was so brilliantly constructed by Aaron, the overall goal was intact. His most convincing trait, as a value for me (and not without irony), was just how literally convincing he could be to a guy like Mark. And when you have the opportunity to do a large number of takes like David likes to do, the dialogue becomes such a part of you. It makes it easier to rattle off a few pages of poetry. Yes, I just referred to Aaronâs dialogue as poetry.â
I have an additional theory. Later in our e-mail exchange, Timberlake mentioned: âI come from a family of people that think that they are really funny. If it was up to my family, I would be doing comedies forever.â
To be funny, you have to be smart, think fast, talk fast, and have flawless timing. Those are Sean Parker attributes. Maybe Timberlake began to form them doing standup in the family living room.
Judging by photos of the real Zuckerberg and Parker, Timberlake looks something like each of them. âBut I sense the Parker role was closer to your inner rhythms,â I said. âWrong?â
âThe script was its own song, really,â he said. âThe rhythm of this film was so established by Sorkin. He laid the foundation of this world of hyper-smart college kids. I canât think of a writer working today that could have done a more masterful job. If youâre asking about which role I would have preferred? Parker. Hands down. The way that character was written was just too much fun.
âBut I felt like these two characters probably suffered from the same fears and insecurities. They both invented something to connect with the world comfortably, too. Mark invented Facebook. Sean invented Sean Parker.â
I gather no one on the movie met Zuckerberg. Did you meet, or did you already know, Parker?
âI met him briefly in New York. At the time, I hadnât been cast in the film but it was speculated that I might be playing the role. We spoke for a second and he seemed like a really nice guy.â
I observed that Parker has dialog where he brags that he brought the music industry to its knees, and put record stores out of business. Thereâs some irony in a multi-million album seller like Timberland saying this dialog, yes?
âTo be honest, it really didnât hit me until I screened the film for the first time. When you are embodying a character, you believe every part of what they are feeling and saying and doing. It could have been the iPod that he invented. It was more important for me to find out why he was bragging about it, I felt. I think any bravado that came out of the character was a safety mechanism to hide all of the darker parts of him. But, in my personal opinion, I think it takes more than one person to bring down something like the music industry. Much like it took more than one person to make Facebook a billion-dollar company.â
You were a gifted kid who basically overnight found himself a star and then a mogul. Same story with Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg. Were there Parker figures in your early career?
âThe music industry is full of them. Iâll leave it at that.â
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10/29/2010 7:40 PM
Sunday, November 21 â 7:30 PM THE SOCIAL NETWORK, 2010, Sony Pictures, 120 min. Dir. David Fincher. Spurred on by a bitter taste for revenge after his girlfriend dumps him, computer whiz Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) creates a social networking site that evolves into an international phenomenon: Facebook. He and his partners quickly discover, however, that success comes at a very large price. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkinâs swift, witty script recalls both the rapid-fire newspaper comedies of the classic studio era and the smart adult dramas of the 1970s, yet is also the most modern and timely movie of 2010. [35mm] Discussion following the film with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Cast members TBA.
Sunday, November 21 â 7:30 PM
THE SOCIAL NETWORK, 2010, Sony Pictures, 120 min. Dir. David Fincher. Spurred on by a bitter taste for revenge after his girlfriend dumps him, computer whiz Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) creates a social networking site that evolves into an international phenomenon: Facebook. He and his partners quickly discover, however, that success comes at a very large price. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkinâs swift, witty script recalls both the rapid-fire newspaper comedies of the classic studio era and the smart adult dramas of the 1970s, yet is also the most modern and timely movie of 2010. [35mm] Discussion following the film with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Cast members TBA.
There was a similar event for "3:10 to Yuma" a couple of years ago, and Christian Bale attended it.****************Also, there is a panel discussion as part of AFI Fest next Friday (Nov 5th) at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Two of Justin's castmates will be attending. The panel's theme is actors under 30, and Justin still would qualify as a "TBA" panelist, at least for a couple more months:http://www.americancinematheque.com/archive1999/2010/Egyptian/AFI_Fest_ET2010.htm#YOUNG%20HOLLYWOOD
Friday, November 5 â 7:30 PM LOS ANGELES TIMES ROUNDTABLE: YOUNG HOLLYWOOD, 90 min. Los Angeles Times Calendar writer Amy Kaufman sits down with some of Hollywood's brightest young talent for an inside look at life in front of the cameras (and on the red carpet) for the film industry's under-30 stars. Roundtable discussion with Academy Award nominee Carey Mulligan, Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, with additional panelists TBA. Get your free tickets at www.afifest.com starting October 28th. Not available on Fandango.
Friday, November 5 â 7:30 PM
LOS ANGELES TIMES ROUNDTABLE: YOUNG HOLLYWOOD, 90 min. Los Angeles Times Calendar writer Amy Kaufman sits down with some of Hollywood's brightest young talent for an inside look at life in front of the cameras (and on the red carpet) for the film industry's under-30 stars. Roundtable discussion with Academy Award nominee Carey Mulligan, Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, with additional panelists TBA. Get your free tickets at www.afifest.com starting October 28th. Not available on Fandango.
Posts: 9941
10/29/2010 7:57 PM
I'm bringing sexy...a-Bach
10/30/2010 5:31 AM
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