Hey Jude, how about Guitar Hero: The Beatles?
A Guitar Hero: The Beatles title is music to the ears of the owner of the John Lennon- Paul McCartney song book copyrights.
It would appear as though this Guitar Hero thing is the real deal, because even the notoriously fickle folks behind The Beatles song catalogue have warmed to the idea of a themed GH game that features the mop topped musical machinations of one of the world's most popular bands.
In an article over at the Los Angeles Times today, Martin N. "Marty" Bandier, the top executive at the music publishing company that owns the John Lennon- Paul McCartney copyrights, said he "liked the idea" of a dedicated Beatles edition of Guitar Hero.
"It's something we have talked about and something I'd like to pursue," Bandier said.
This is the second themed Guitar Hero spin off that has been announced in as many months. As was reported in GamePro last month, Activision revealed that Aerosmith would be the first act with a dedicated version of Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith will launch in June for the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.
Sci Fi keeps fight going with 'Battlestar' prequel
NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Sci Fi Channel's "Battlestar Galactica" will live on with "Caprica." At its "upfront" presentation to advertisers Tuesday in New York, the cable channel said that it has green-lighted a two-hour pilot for the prequel, which had been in development for two years.
Sci Fi also has given the go-ahead to "True Believer," a two-hour back-door pilot created by Rosario Dawson and David Atchinson -- who co-wrote the comic book series "Occult Crimes Task Force" -- about a comic book enthusiast who hires a former superhero to teach him about crime-fighting. It joins "The Stranded," a two-hour pilot of a Sci Fi/Virgin Comics joint venture.
The network also plans an "Alice in Wonderland"-based six-hour miniseries titled "Alice." A two-hour comedy-drama pilot, "Deputized," follows a man who fights crime around the galaxy after getting super powers.
"Caprica," which is set 50 years before the events in the departing "Battlestar," will begin production in the spring. It hails from the "Battlestar" masterminds Ronald D. Moore and David Eick.
As for "Battlestar," the series' final-season premiere will debut online nine hours before it airs on TV.
Sci Fi's reality slate includes "Estate of Panic," a series about seven people who compete to find millions of dollars at an estate, and "Brain Trust," in which geniuses bands together to solve problems. The channel also announced new seasons of "Scare Tactics," now hosted by "30 Rock's" Tracy Morgan; "Mind Control With Derren Brown"; and "Ghost Hunters International." And a May 18 special by NBC News correspondent Lester Holt will feature "Mystery of the Crystal Skulls," about the real-life search for what the objects at the center of the latest "Indiana Jones" movie.
The channel also will expand its digital offerings with a game site launching in mid-April as well as "Battlestar" webisodes and a social game based on the show. An original Web series, "Starcrossed," is planned to debut in the fourth quarter.
Aimee Mann's 7th album scheduled for June release
NEW YORK (Billboard) - Aimee Mann's seventh album, "@#%&! Smilers," will arrive June 3 via her own SuperEgo Records.
"The sound is a little bit different for me," Mann told Billboard.com. "It's got a lot of Moog (synthesizer) on it (and) sometimes almost sounds like the Cars a little bit. From song to song, everything gets a different treatment."
Mann also noted, "There's no electric guitar at all, which you weirdly don't miss. It's kind of this all-keyboard situation, which is great. It's an interesting amalgamation of sounds."
Mann's upcoming tour will include an appearance at the Bonnaroo festival in June.
Robin Williams set for `Law & Order'
LOS ANGELES - Robin Williams will guest star on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," but don't expect him to bring laughs to the NBC crime drama.
Williams is playing an "engineer whose life has gone terribly wrong" and who faces serious repercussions, series spokeswoman Pam Golum said Tuesday. The episode, which films later this month, is scheduled to air April 29.
After his breakthrough role on the 1980s sitcom "Mork & Mindy," Williams' career has mostly centered on a mix of movies, including "Good Morning, Vietnam," "Dead Poets Society" and "Patch Adams." He won an Academy Award for 1997's "Good Will Hunting."
The "Special Victims Unit" episode with Williams, titled "Authority," is the show's 200th, Golum said.
Writer Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey" and won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday, an aide said. He was 90.
Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome for years, died at 1:30 a.m. in his adopted home of Sri Lanka after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.
The 1968 story "2001: A Space Odyssey" — written simultaneously as a novel and screenplay with director Stanley Kubrick — was a frightening prophesy of artificial intelligence run amok.
One year after it made Clarke a household name in fiction, the scientist entered the homes of millions of Americans alongside Walter Cronkite anchoring television coverage of the Apollo mission to the moon.
Clarke also was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.
His non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment.
"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."
From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and non-fiction, sometimes publishing three books in a year. He published his best-selling "3001: The Final Odyssey" when he was 79.
A statement from Clarke's office said that Clarke had recently reviewed the final manuscript of his latest novel. "The Last Theorem," co-written with Frederik Pohl, will be published later this year, the statement said.
Some of his best-known books are "Childhood's End," 1953; "The City and The Stars," 1956, "The Nine Billion Names of God," 1967; "Rendezvous with Rama," 1973; "Imperial Earth," 1975; and "The Songs of Distant Earth," 1986.
When Clarke and Kubrick got together to develop a movie about space, they used as basic ideas several of Clarke's shorter pieces, including "The Sentinel," written in 1948, and "Encounter in the Dawn." As work progressed on the screenplay, Clarke also wrote a novel of the story. He followed it up with "2010," "2061," and "3001: The Final Odyssey."
In 1989, two decades after the Apollo 11 moon landings, Clarke wrote: "2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined."
Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 and 1980, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989.
Born in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917, the son of a farmer, Arthur Charles Clark became addicted to science fiction after buying his first copies of the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" at Woolworth's. He read English writers H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and began writing for his school magazine in his teens.
Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and wrote his first short stories and scientific articles on space travel.
It was not until after the World War II that Clarke received a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics from King's College in London.
In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar blind-landing system.
But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications that led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications — an idea whose time had decidedly not come.
Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched.
Clarke married in 1953, and was divorced in 1964. He had no children.
He moved to the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka in 1956 after embarking on a study of the Great Barrier Reef.
Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, discovered that scuba-diving approximated the feeling of weightlessness that astronauts experience in space. He remained a diving enthusiast, running his own scuba venture into old age.
"I'm perfectly operational underwater," he once said.
Clarke was linked by his computer with friends and fans around the world, spending each morning answering e-mails and browsing the Internet.
At a 90th birthday party thrown for Clarke in December, the author said he had three wishes: for Sri Lanka's raging civil war to end, for the world to embrace cleaner sources of energy and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings to be discovered.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Clarke once said he did not regret having never followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent into orbit.
"One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time," he said. "Move over, Stephen King."
Oscar winner Minghella dies at 54
LONDON - Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella, who turned such literary works as "The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Cold Mountain" into acclaimed movies, has died. He was 54.
Minghella's publicist, Jonathan Rutter, said the filmmaker died Tuesday morning at London's Charing Cross Hospital of a hemorrhage. He said Minghella was operated on last week for a growth in his neck, "and the operation seemed to have gone well. At 5 a.m. today he had a fatal hemorrhage."
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who became friends with Minghella after the filmmaker directed a Labour Party election ad in 2005, said he was "really shocked and very sad."
"Anthony Minghella was a wonderful human being, creative and brilliant, but still humble, gentle and a joy to be with," Blair said. "Whatever I did with him, personally or professionally, left me with complete admiration for him, as a character and as an artist of the highest caliber."
"The English Patient," the 1996 World War II drama, won nine Academy Awards, including best director for Minghella, best picture and best supporting actress for Juliette Binoche. Based on the celebrated novel by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, the movie tells of a burn victim's tortured recollections of his misdeeds in time of war.
In a 1996 interview with The Associated Press, Minghella said the film was the pinnacle of his career at the time: "I feel more naked and more exposed by this piece of work than anything I've ever been involved with."
He said too many modern films let the audience be passive, as if they were saying, "We're going to rock you and thrill you. We'll do everything for you."
"This film goes absolutely against that grain," he said. "It says, `I'm sorry, but you're going to have to make some connections. There are some puzzles here. The story will constantly rethread itself and it will be elliptical, but there are enormous rewards in that.'"
Minghella (pronounced min-GELL'-ah) also was nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay for the movie and for his screenplay for "The Talented Mr. Ripley."
His 2003 "Cold Mountain," based on Charles Frazier's novel of the U.S. Civil War, brought a best supporting actress Oscar for Renee Zellweger.
The 1999 "The Talented Mr. Ripley," starring Matt Damon as a murderous social climber, was based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. It earned five Oscar nominations.
Among his other films were "Truly, Madly, Deeply" (1990), and last year's Oscar-nominated "Michael Clayton," on which he was executive producer.
Minghella also turned his talents to opera. In 2005, he directed a highly successful staging of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" at the English National Opera in London — choreographed by Minghella's wife, Carolyn Choa. The following year, he staged it for the season opener of New York's Metropolitan Opera. It was the first performance of the Met's new era under general manager Peter Gelb.
Minghella was recently in Botswana filming an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's novel "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency." It is due to air on British television this week.
The book is the first in a series about the adventures of Botswanan private eye Precious Ramotswe; a 13-part television series was recently commission by U.S. network HBO.
Jeff Ramsay, press secretary to Botswanan President Festus Mogae, called Minghella's death a "shock and an utter loss."
He said the director had been coming to the country ahead of the detective film and learning about Botswana.
Ramsay said Minghella had told him how he had been forced to shoot "Cold Mountain" in Romania and that it had "seemed wrong." He said this made the director "more sure that the film could only be shot in Botswana."
Born the second of five children to southern Italian emigrants, Minghella came to moviemaking from a flourishing playwriting career on the London "fringe" and, in 1986, on the West End with the play, "Made in Bangkok," a hard-hitting look at the sexual mores of a British tour group in Thailand.
He worked as a television script editor before making his directing debut with "Truly, Madly, Deeply," a comedy about love and grief starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman.
Producer David Puttnam told the BBC that Minghella was "a very special person."
"He wasn't just a writer, or a writer-director, he was someone who was very well-known and very well-loved within the film community," Puttnam said. "Frankly he was far too young to have gone."
Minghella is survived by his wife; his actor son, Max Minghella; and his daughter, Hannah.
Raconteurs Album Being Rushed To Market Next Week
The Raconteurs are eschewing the standard months-long wait between finishing an album and releasing it with "Consolers of the Lonely," which will hit retail March 25 via Third Man/Warner Bros. The set wasn't even completed until the first week of March, according to a statement from the band.
"The purpose: to get the album to the fans as soon as possible and as we promised," the Jack White-featuring band says. "We wanted to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding it's availability, reception or perception."
"Consolers" will be available on CD, vinyl and digital through leading retailers. "Some places couldn't move this fast, so they will join in as soon as they can," reads the statement, without elaboration.
The Raconteurs' Web site will offer the album as a complete download in 320kb fidelity. Individual tracks will be available at iTunes and Amazon.com. A video for the first single, "Salute Your Solution," will hit the Web on March 25.
The Raconteurs, which finds White surrounded by Brendan Benson, Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence, released their debut album, "Broken Boy Soldiers," in May 2006. Their move here extends the experimentation of acts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails in delivering music outside the parameters of the traditional label system
"We wanted to explore the idea of releasing an album everywhere at once and THEN marketing and promoting it thereafter," the band says. "The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first week sales, pre-release promotion or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it."