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Mitchell Krauss, a Middle East correspondent for CBS News who was wounded in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, died on January 27 at Northern Dutchess Hospital in New York, near his home in Rhinebeck. He was 90 and died from kidney failure.

Krauss was the correspondent and the bureau chief in Cairo during a 25-year career at CBS News. On October 6, 1981, he was covering a military parade and was near enough to the Egyptian leader to suffer a shrapnel wound to his leg in the grenade and automatic weapons attack that killed Sadat.

One of only a few reporters on the scene, he was able to file an audio report that was broadcast later as part of a CBS Special Report on the assassination. Krauss then managed to get on a flight to Rome with the CBS videotape of the event before the Cairo airport was shut down.

He later

Antony I. Ginnane has long been concerned about what he regards as a high level of film illiteracy among many writers, producers and directors, both established and emerging.

And the veteran producer/distributor believes that even among those filmmakers who are steeped in screen history, some have little or no knowledge of the countless classic films produced in the decades before the 1970s.

That.s part of the motivation for Ginnane.s new book, The Unusual Suspects: 104 Films That Made World Cinema, which Currency Press is launching next month.

His eclectic choices range from D.W. Griffith.s Way Down East (1920) through to Quentin Tarantino.s Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003).

Omitting any title produced after 2003, he explains, does not suggest that no great films had been made since then, but rather that the grammar of cinema had already been laid down.

He is quick to point out his list, which includes Alfred Hitchcock.s Vertigo,

Actor-director-writer David Field plans to pen a biography of his great mate Bill Hunter.

Field revealed his plans on Facebook, prompting numerous offers of help from colleagues and friends of the much-loved actor who died in 2011, aged 71.

Close buddies for more than 25 years, Hunter and Field often discussed co-writing a book but never got around to it.

.We were having too much fun,. Field tells If. He may use the title suggested by Hunter, which trades on one of the actor's favourite expressions, .Stand Where and Say What?.

Field first met Hunter, whose credits include Newsfront, Gallipoli, Strictly Ballroom, Muriel's Wedding, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, Road to Nhill, Crackerjack, The Pacific and The Cup, at the Belvoir Theatre.

They worked together twice, in Laurie McInnes. 1993 black-and-white drama Broken Highway and in Alkinos Tsilimidos.s 2004 film Tom White, which starred Colin Friels as an architect whose life unravels after a nervous breakdown.

Greg Coote was remembered as the .heart and soul. of the Australian film renaissance of the 1970s and 80s at a celebration of his life and career on Sunday. Hundreds of family, friends and former colleagues gathered at Village Roadshow.s Sydney offices to pay homage to the film and TV industry executive and producer who died at his home in Los Angeles on June 27, aged 72. .Like so many filmmakers I owe my career to Greg Coote,. said Newsfront director Phillip Noyce in a message read by David Elfick, who produced that 1978 classic.

Noyce credited Coote with championing the film from the script stage right through the shoot, editing and the theatrical release. .He was the heart and soul of the new wave of Australian cinema in the 1970s and 80s,. the director said. Village Roadshow co-chairman/co-ceo Graham Burke noted that his long-time friend and former colleague spent 58 years in the screen industry,

There wil be a celebration of the life of actress Wendy Hughes in Melbourne on Sunday June 1.

The venue is the Melbourne Theatre Company, Southbank Theatre Foyer, 140 Southbank Boulevard, Southbank.

The event will begin at 3 pm..

Hughes, who passed away in Sydney in March, aged 61, won the AFI award for best actress for Careful, He Might Hear You in 1983 and was nominated on six other occasions, for Newsfront, My Brilliant Career, Lonely Hearts, My First Wife, Echoes of Paradise and Boundaries of the Heart.

Australian actress Wendy Hughes dead at 61 (photo: Wendy Hughes in ‘Newsfront’) Australian film, television, and stage actress Wendy Hughes, best known internationally for the big-screen dramas My Brilliant Career and Careful, He Might Hear You, died of cancer early today, March 8, 2014, in Sydney. Hughes (born on July 29, 1952, in Melbourne) was 61. Wendy Hughes’ film career kicked off in the mid-’70s, with Tim Burstall’s psychological drama ‘Jock’ Petersen / Petersen (1974), in which she plays the wife of a college professor who becomes romantically involved with a married student (Jack Thompson). "I spent a lot of the time naked and doing sex scenes," Hughes would later recall about her work in ‘Jock’ Petersen, "because in the seventies you all had to do that." In 1979, Hughes landed a key supporting role in the international arthouse hit My Brilliant Career, Gillian Armstrong’s late 19th-century-set tale of an independent-minded young woman (a Katharine Hepburn

Wendy Hughes, who has died in Sydney aged 61, will be remembered by her peers as one of the finest actors of her generation.

Hughes won the AFI award for best actress for Careful, He Might Hear You in 1983 and was nominated on six other occasions, for Newsfront, My Brilliant Career, Lonely Hearts, My First Wife, Echoes of Paradise and Boundaries of the Heart.

.She was a brilliant actress who set the standard and was pioneering for her era,. filmmaker Philippe Mora, who was a close friend in the 1980s and early 1990s, told If.

.In my opinion without Wendy there would have been no Judy Davis, no Nicole Kidman and no Cate Blanchett. If timing had been different she would have been a major international star. As it is she leaves a legacy of perfect performances as one of Australia's greatest actresses..

Mora wanted to cast Hughes as the female

Phillip Noyce.s Rabbit- Proof Fence may seem to have nothing in common with his latest film, The Giver, a dystopian sci-fi drama which stars Jeff Bridges, Meryl Steep, Brenton Thwaites, Katie Holmes and Taylor Swift.

But there are strong thematic similarities between his 2002 Stolen Generations drama and the Us-financed film based on a young adult novel by Lois Lowry..

.Both are about insiders who finds themselves on the outside of their community,. the director told If from New York, where he.s working around the clock in an editing suite.

.Ïn The Giver, Jonas, the central character, lives in an overbearing, very doctrinaire society. He sets off on a very long journey to find a true home. Thematically that is similar to my earlier films Newsfront, Heatwave and Clear and Present Danger..

Noyce cast young Aussie Brenton Thwaites as Jonas. Bridges is The Giver, an old man who teaches

Rupert Murdoch, the 81-year-old billionaire and the closest living embodiment of Montgomery Burns, is set to have his life story told, in indie movie biopic form, no less. The noted evil genius behind Fox News and an international illegal wiretapping scandal is going to be the subject of a new biographical film called "The News of the World," using the newspaper of the same name as a framing device for the narrative. What's more is that the movie, funded by Screen Australia and written by Bob Ellis and Stephen Ramsay, will be followed by a fourteen-part miniseries. Apparently what "The Dark Tower" project couldn't accomplish, a super-lengthy Rupert Murdoch biopic can. Ellis wrote the journalism drama "Newsfront" for Philip Noyce and co-wrote a miniseries in the '80s with Ramsay. Although casting has yet to be finalized, Ellis said that his first choice for the part of Murdoch would be New Zealand actor Marton Csokas,

Taxpayer-Funded Screen Australia Backs Anti-Murdoch Project Rupert Murdoch seems unlikely to be bothered that unabashed left-wing writer Bob Ellis is co-writing a movie about the publisher entitled The News of the World. Murdoch might, however, ask why Australian taxpayers’ money is being spent to develop the project. Funding agency Screen Australia is giving money to Ellis and his co-writer Stephen Ramsey to support development. No Australian distributor is involved yet. Ellis told Mumbrella the biopic will trace Murdoch’s career from his purchase of the Sydney Daily Telegraph in the 1960s to his buying the now-defunct The News of the World and becoming a U.S. citizen so News Corp could own U.S. TV stations. Ellis’ blog regularly accuses Murdoch of using his media outlets to champion his causes. After penning the screenplay of Newsfront in 1978, Ellis had a burgeoning career in the 1980s with films such as Fatty Finn,

Screen Australia has provided funding development for "The News of the World", a telemovie and potential 14-part miniseries follow-up which would explore the early career and rise of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Political commentator, speech writer, journalist and filmmaker Bob Ellis is co-writing the script with Stephen Ramsay. The famously left-wing Ellis has worked a lot on film and television, penning such features as "Newsfront," "The Nostradamus Kid," "Goodbye Paradise" and "Fatty Finn". He also hit controversy last year for heavily criticising current Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard while simultaneously gushing praise over conservative Opposition leader Tony Abbott.

Ellis tells Mumbrella: "What we have done starts at 1960 with his early career when he bought the Daily Telegraph off Packer and then to when he bought News of the World and how he burst on the world of America and became a friend of Nixon and got a license as a foreigner media owner.

Just last week, Landon and I discussed the risk Orson Welles and Rko took in making Citizen Kane, likening it to a major studio making a fictional movie based on Rupert Murdoch at the height of his power. According to Twitch, it won’t be made by a major studio, but an indie outlet is pushing forward with a direct biopic of the media mogul. Screen Australia is investing funds into developing a script called The News of the World, which will focus on Murdoch’s purchase of that same-titled newspaper in the 1960s as a way to tell his life story. Judging by his recent legal problems, it may not come with a Hollywood ending. The screenplay will come from Bob Ellis (Newsfront, Man of Flowers) – who hasn’t been active in filmmaking since the mid-1990s – alongside Stephen Ramsay. The acute danger of a project like this is that it will be far too blunt

The story of Rupert Murdoch’s rise to become the world’s biggest media mogul looks set to become an Australian TV telemovie,

Screen Australia has provided funding development for the work which is being written by Bob Ellis and Stephen Ramsay.

The announcement comes days after Southern Star’s production of Howzat, the story of how Australian media mogul Kerry Packer took on the cricket establishment delivered the Nine Network with 2m+ ratings.

The series has the working title of The News of the World.

The British Sunday tabloid the telemovie is named after was closed by Murdoch last year in the wake of the phone hacking scandal.

Bob Ellis wrote the Australian journalism drama Newsfront and most recently ABC’s Infamous Victory: Ben Chifley’s Battle for Coal while Stephen Ramsey wrote and directed The Baby Boomers Picture Show and Flashbacks.

Ellis told Mumbrella: “What we have

More than a decade after the controversial film’s release, Bob Ellis considers whether Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper, starring Russell Crowe, has stood the test of time.

It was nine years before Tampa, four years before Hanson, but there it was, ugly, prophetic, violent, Romper Stomper. ‘This is not your country’. A frankly Hitlerist gang of tattooed thugs going after Asians with baseball bats, bricks and knives in Footscray alleys, defending Australia’s racial and cultural purity. ‘Won’t let what happened to the Abos happen to us,’ says Hando, the headshaven pack leader, urging his eager swarm of war-painted dysfunctionals on, despising pasta as ‘wog food’ and smashing up Japanese cars, pushing back the yellow hordes with Howardite gravitas, we will decide who comes here, and tribal pride. He may lose this war against the unceasing invader, but he will give it his best shot. Russell Crowe in

A Phillip Noyce retrospective and other Australian and Nz films have been selected to screen at the 42nd International Film Festival of India.

The retrospective of Noyce’s work includes Clear and Present Danger, Catch a Fire, The Quiet American, and Australian films Newsfront and Backroads.

Of the acknowledgement, Noyce said: “I‘m delighted that the International Film Festival of India will share with audiences films spanning my whole career. The screening of Backroads and Newsfront will give Indian audiences a taste of Australian acting icon, Bill Hunter, in two of the roles that first revealed his remarkable talent.”

Noyce will attend the festival and present a day-long master class on the process of translating ideas from concept, through script development, to the finished product.

The film festival, in its Australasian program will also screen local films Oranges and Sunshine, Matching Jack with director Nadia Tass in attendance, and New

Brendan Cowell (Love My Way, Beneath Hill 60), Ella Scott Lynch (Crownies) and Toby Schmitz (Griff the Invisible, Lbf) will headline a cast for Cockatoo Island’s In The Raw screenplay presentation of psychological thriller Metamorphosis.

The In The Raw presentations help give filmmakers a better understanding on how the film will read while an industry panel give feedback.

Allanah Zitserman, creative director of Cockatoo Island Film Festival, said “Metamorphosis is a new psychological thriller and that the script reading will present a unique opportunity for audiences and the industry panel (including established film directors Samantha Lang and Elissa Down) to provide valuable feedback regarding its development.”

The film is written by Kris Wyld (East West 101, White Collar Blue, Wildside) and will be produced by David Elfick (Rabbit Proof Fence, Newsfront).

The event is Monday 26 September at 6pm at Aftrs Theatre, 130 Bent St, The Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park.

Admission

Australian actor known for his roles in Strictly Ballroom and Muriel's Wedding

For many Australians, the screen persona of the character actor Bill Hunter, who has died of cancer aged 71, was the archetypal "ocker", an uncultivated Australian working man who enjoys beer, "barbies", Aussie rules football and V8 supercars. According to Phillip Noyce, who directed the oft-bearded actor in three movies and a TV miniseries: "Bill was the absolute essence of the Anglo-Irish Australian male of the 20th century. Seemingly gruff and impenetrable, he could convey the tenderness beneath the exterior."

He was seen and appreciated by millions in three of Australia's biggest hit films – Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom (1992), Pj Hogan's Muriel's Wedding (1994) and Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) – all revealing Hunter at the peak of his powers.

He was born in Melbourne, but was brought up in rural Victoria, in Australia's south-east.

Australian director Phillip Noyce is leading the tributes to his Newsfront star Bill Hunter, who died on Saturday following a battle with cancer.

Directors and actors from the Australian film community have expressed their sorrow after the Muriel's Wedding star passed away at a Melbourne hospice.

Noyce - who cast Hunter in four of his films, including his 1978 hit Newsfront - branded the acting legend "extraordinary".

He says, "He was the epitome, the absolute essence of the Anglo-Irish Australian male of the 20th century. Hunter was us and that's why we liked him and that's why us directors kept using him and why Australian audiences kept responding to him. He defined us. Hunter was extraordinary."

Meanwhile, Hunter's friend and fellow actor David Field says, "(He had) extraordinary instinct and intelligence, a very profound human being. The everyman on the street was the man he loved - from hobo upwards he didn't mind. He always had time for everyone, for all his kind of roaring bluff, he was a very sensitive and very gentle man."

Filmmaker Simon Wincer, who directed Hunter in The Cup, insists his death leaves a void in the entertainment industry Down Under, adding, "He was associated really with the renaissance of the Australian film industry from the '70s right up until the last few months."

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has also paid her respects: "Mr. Hunter played a key role as an acclaimed actor in helping to define Australian culture over five decades on screen and on stage. He told us Australian stories in an Australian voice at a time when we were debating and developing our sense of national identity."

A memorial service for Hunter will be held at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne on Thursday.

There will be a public memorial service at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre on Thursday 26 May, at 2pm, for Bill Hunter’s passing.

For those in Sydney, there will be an informal get together at Bondi Icebergs’ downstairs bistro, also at 2pm.

Alternatively for those around the country, in the words of Hunter’s management, Mark Morrissey & Associates, “We invite you – whether you be in your favourite pub, a theatre, at home, in country towns, on the land, with friends – anywhere throughout Australia – on Thursday 26 – to ‘Raise your glass to Bill Hunter’ as a salute and a final farewell to a great man.”

Bill Hunter passed away on Saturday 21 May, approximately 8pm, from cancer, surrounded by friends and family.

Hunter had battled the disease and refused to enter hospital but was admitted to a Melbourne hospice earlier in the week, reports ABC News.

Encore contributor and Newsfront screenwriter Bob Ellis remembers

Australian acting legend Bill Hunter has died at the age of 71.

The Muriel's Wedding star passed away on on Saturday surrounded by his family at a Melbourne hospice following a battle with cancer, according to his manager Mark Morrissey.

Hunter was admitted to the hospice on 16 May and his loved ones flocked to his bedside after doctors informed him they would not be able to operate.

His career began on Australian television in the 1960s and by the 1970s, he had become one of the country's most popular actors with roles in films including Gallipoli, alongside Mel Gibson, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.

In 1978, he was honoured with the Australian Film Institute (AFI) Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for Newsfront and he scooped the Best Supporting Actor AFI Award for Gallipoli in 1981.

Hunter, who became known for playing stereotypically gruff Australian men with big hearts, was also awarded the Centenary Medal for his service to acting in 2001. He has also voiced parts in Finding Nemo and last year's Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole.

News of his cancer emerged on 18 May, sending shock waves through the film industry Down Under, with filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, who worked with Hunter in the 1992 hit Strictly Ballroom and the 2008 epic Australia, offering his support to the ill star.