UAE widENS cRAckdOwN; MORE ISlAMiStS ... - Kuwait Times

Indian Bollywood actors Akshay Kumar and Sonakshi Sinha pose with director
Prabhu Deva during the DVD launch for the Hindi film Rowdy Rathore in
Mumbai on July 28, 2012. —AFP
A lawyer
Snoop Dogg denied
Norway entry for
2 years for pot
representing Snoop Dogg
says the American rapper has been
banned from entering Norway for
two years after trying to enter the country
with a small amount of marijuana last
month. Holger Hagesaeter, the rapper’s
legal representative in Norway, told The
Associated Press on Saturday that his
client “can live with the decision” and has
no immediate plans to appeal it.
Snoop Dogg, whose name is Calvin
Broadus, was on his way to a music festival
in southern Norway in June when
sniffer dogs detected eight grams of marijuana
in his luggage. He was also carrying
more cash than is legally allowed and
was fined 52,000 kroner ($8,600) after
admitting to the two offenses, the lawyer
said. —AP
37 LIFESTYLE
Members of the band Metallica, from left to right; Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo, pose at a photocall
before their first of eight concert performances in Mexico City, Saturday, July 28, 2012. The heavy metal band added two
more tour dates to their Mexico City run after a record six sold out August shows. —AP
A Russian
Russia courts Hollywood
with vast new studios
company has spent $89 million
building Eastern Europe’s largest production
facilities in a field outside Moscow
and hopes to lure Hollywood majors to shoot
and produce movies. The idea is to create a
modern flagship studio that will make Russia a
competitively priced destination for film projects
and in turn modernize the local industry. “It is
one of the targets for us to invite international
projects to get their experience, to get their
technologies,” general-director of the Glavkino
grou, Ilya Bachurin, told AFP.
Opened by President Dmitry Medvedev in
February, on a recent tour the Glavkino studios
were still dusty from the construction process
and smelled of paint.
Bachurin, 42, a former impresario and television
executive, led the way through the studios
to show off echoing sound stages and hi-tech
3D equipment. The largest sound stage measures
3,108 square metres (33,4340 square feet), a
space so large that it swallowed up a bus parked
in the corner. “It’s the biggest in eastern Europe,”
Bachurin said. The studios have a Hollywoodstyle
sign on the roof visible from passing
planes. Their website boasts they are “equivalent
to the best studios of America and Europe”. So
far one feature film has been completed at
Glavkino: “August 8,” a strongly pro-Russian drama
based on the 2008 Russia-Georgia war that
was 90 percent funded by the Kremlin.
It aims to attract major global players to do
studio shoots and post-production there and
pass on their expertise to Russia’s technically lagging
film industry. “In fact we do not need their
money-it’s not our major goal,” said Bachurin.
“We need to attract their experience and their
specialists: those who can make the studio a
part of the big international filmmaking industry.”
In June Glavkino gave British art-house
director Peter Greenaway a voucher worth
30,000 euros ($37,000) to spend on post-production
for a planned remake of “Death in Venice.”
Greenaway told Hollywood Reporter he was
considering Saint Petersburg as a location.
Without giving details, Bachurin said that
Glavkino was planning to submit quotes for several
big international projects.
‘We do not feel competition with Mosfilm’
One problem is that Russia offers no tax
breaks for filmmakers. Add in a mass of
headaches from tough rules on customs to visas
and work permits. “We are going to make special
proposals, make prices lower,” said Bachurin.
“This is a pragmatic business. If it is convenient
and profitable, people will be ready to do the
maths.” Viktor Ginzburg, a Russian-born film
director based in the United States was visiting
the studios with a view to making his next film
there-an adaptation of Viktor Pelevin’s novel
“Empire V”. He said he was impressed by the
facilities. “It seems terrific. They should dust it,
though,” he added. Yet he said the hi-tech studios
still lacked something: “film culture”. “You
need projection designers, art directors, set decorators,
craftsmen,” he said.
“Unfortunately there is a real problem in the
Russian film industry right now with these key
positions.” That is a hangover from the 1990s
when the film industry almost dried up and professions
skipped an entire generation. While
Glavkino is brand-new, it reeks of money and
connections. Its name uses Soviet-speak abbreviations:
“glav” or main and “kino” meaning cinema
or film, to suggest the historic roots it lacks.
One co-founder with Bachurin is actor and director
Fyodor Bondarchuk, 45, who made hit films
including “The 9th Company.” His father Sergei
Bondarchuk directed the Oscar-winning “War
and Peace.” Another co-owner is Konstantin
Ernst, the director-general of state-controlled
Channel One television, which also has a major
film-making division.
The three men together with UralSib bank
own 50 percent, while the other 50 percent
belongs to private investor Vitaly Golovachev,
according to Glavkino’s website. The studio was
built after the owners raised a massive loan from
VTB bank. Glavkino could hardly be more different
from what is still Russia’s main film studio,
Mosfilm, a maze of buildings dating from the
1930s in a busy urban area hemmed in by construction.
“We do not feel it will be competition
with Mosfilm, because the market for technical
services is not filled, even now as we finish the
Glavkino studios,” Bachurin said.
Currently Glavkino is mainly being used to
make television shows, while the plan is for the
proportion to change to half-and-half. A second
stage upgrading the studios with equipment
and everything from costume workshops to a
five-star hotel will cost a further $120 million
and is expected to be finished by the end of
2013. —AFP
Seb Webber stood in a stark office space 12
floors above Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood,
surveying his new domain. The 27-year-old
London expatriate and the recently minted managing
director of the music-services firm SQE was
dressed in his typical plastic Buddy Holly glasses
and skinny black jeans. His office’s polished concrete
floors lacked furniture for the moment _
move-in day was a week or so away _ but he had a
gorgeous floor-to-ceiling panorama of the
Hollywood Hills to his north and, on this clear day,
almost to Catalina Island in the west.
It’s a workplace view befitting a lavish new tech
startup or a cash-flush film production house. But
Webber’s company is in a more volatile (pessimists
might even say doomed) line of work. SQE is a
contrarian bet that the music industry won’t be
saved by novel technology or a radical new profit
stream. Its magic bullet, if there is one, is absolute
flexibility and transparency in handling a growing
stable of artists like the punky Coachella 2012
headliner At the Drive-In and pop-savvy dubstep
auteur Rusko.
“Our idea was, ‘Isn’t there a good company
where you don’t feel cheated?’” Webber said. “I see
us as a service. We literally just execute on their
behalf. No one knows better than them what they
want.” The L.A. office of SQE is the American arm
and new flagship of the British Columbia-founded
firm that President Nathan Beswick and Chief
Executive Duncan MacRae _ both in their mid- to
late 20s _ started in 2010.
SQE’s first big coup was landing Webber. He left
his position as the vice president of A&R for the
U.K.-based XL Recordings to helm the firm.
Billboard had even named Webber one of its “30
Under 30” music-biz stars in 2010 for his regional
scouting acumen for XL. But after working on
Adele and M.I.A.’s A&R teams and cosigning Odd
Future’s Tyler, the Creator to the label, Webber
wanted to build something from the ground up
instead of being an L.A.-based “Our Man in
Havana” for an English hit label.
“It was really difficult being the L.A. point person
for a U.K. company,” he said. “I’m still close with
Richard (Russell, XL’s founder), and the one thing
he hammered home was that nothing exists without
quality music. But if there was any time to
stand on my own two feet, it was now.” SQE’s business
model is simple _ find ambitious artists, ask
them what they need to realize their career goals
and be able to do anything that can help.
I t’s
not a concert, Danny Boyle stressed. It’s
about the athletes. In a very real way,
though, the director of the Olympic
opening ceremony was wrong. While sports
are the heart of the Olympics, music - loud,
bold, world-conquering British music, amplified
in the most global of settings - was the
booming beat Friday night. One of Boyle’s
stated aims was to showcase “the best of us”
- and ever since the Beatles and the Rolling
Stones appropriated American blues, country
and rock and remade them into something
new, the best of British has been
music.
Music ran like a river through Boyle’s
“Isles of Wonder” extravaganza, which
depicted a Britain brutally wrenched from its
rural past by industrialization and upheaval
before being thrust into a fast, uncertain,
exciting new world - all propelled by the
throb of homegrown music. It began gently,
with Edward Elgar, the hymn “Jerusalem”
and “Danny Boy” - but soon started to rock.
Olympic ceremonies often play it safe.
But Boyle, who brought in the electronic
duo Underworld as musical directors, gave
his show a cheeky edge. The Sex Pistols,
once the outrageous face of punk, were
included with their song “Pretty Vacant.”
Boyle even slipped in a few bars of the
Pistols’ snarling “God Save the Queen” (“the
fascist regime”) early on - although he
respectfully did it before Queen Elizabeth II
herself had entered the stadium. Fashion
designer Wayne Hemingway said including
the Pistols was typical of Boyle’s “wit and
guts.”
“Normally it would be brushed over, but
the punk spirit which is in Britain was written
through the ceremony,” he said. “Anyone
cynical about this has no lust for life. It’s just
bloody brilliant.” In parts, it was like a Union
Jack jukebox - a medley of tracks from the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones, David Bowie
and Queen, the Specials and the Jam, the
Stone Roses and Eurythmics, and what
seemed like dozens more. The list spanned
generations, from The Who’s “My
Generation” right up to live performances
from two of the hottest homegrown acts of
the moment: grime star Dizzee Rascal - who
performed his hit “Bonkers” - and singer
Emeli Sande.
The musical melange continued during
the athletes parade, with members of the
204 national teams circling the track to
everything from “West End Girls” by the Pet
Shop Boys and “Rolling in the Deep” by
Adele. And of course the evening could not
MONDAY, JULY 30, 2012
Olympic opener showed
music is best of British
Dizzee Rascal performs during the Opening Ceremony.
Many traditional record labels and management
teams farm out aspects of artist-caretaking
to specialists at different companies _ a label
fronts advances and distributes physical albums; a
licensing firm places songs in commercials, films
and TV; a publicity company wrangles media coverage.
SQE can do all these things for an artist _ or
take on as few as one of those jobs. SQE handles
management, licensing, press, marketing and
record label duties in-house, with a staff of around
14 who specialize in each field.
When they sign an artist, the musician can
choose which aspects they want to use. Don’t call
have been complete without a Beatle - a
rousing live performance from Paul
McCartney, still rocking at 70. The amazing
thing about the outpouring was how endless
it seemed - a reminder that British
music, decade after decade, has retained its
genius.
Could any other country have pulled off a
similar homegrown aural feast? The United
States, certainly. But Boyle reminded Britain
Opening Ceremony artistic director
Danny Boyle speaks next to the
Olympic Bell ahead of the Opening
Ceremony at the 2012 Summer
Olympics, Friday in London.
—AP photos
how much it has to be proud of - and the
clapping, cheering, singing 60,000-strong
crowd loved him for it. Broadcast to a television
audience estimated at 1 billion, it
played like an excellent ad for Cool Britannia
2.0.
Singer-songwriter Billy Bragg spoke for
many when he tweeted: “Impressive though
(the opening ceremony) in Beijing was, they
didn’t have any great pop music to play, did
they?” And if you haven’t heard enough,
have no fear - Universal Music said an album
of the ceremony soundtrack would be on
sale “within moments” of the ceremony ending.
—AP
SQE takes an all-encompassing approach to handling musical acts
Seb Webber leads the artist management
firm SQE, handling management,
PR, record label and licensing for a select
group of clients, photographed with
their mascot goat, in their new headquarters
on Sunset Boulevard, in the
heart of Hollywood, California, June 4,
2012. —MCT
it a “360 deal” _ SQE has banished that term for a
deal in which a label gives larger advances but
takes cuts from all streams of an artist’s income
from its offices. But the firm does imagine music
management as a holistic project.
“Artists are able to control a lot by themselves
nowadays, and considering the established awareness
of how the business side of their art works, a
la carte is a no smoke-and-mirrors, transparent
way for them to get what they want when they
want it,” Beswick said in an email. For artists, that
transparency and selectivity is the key selling
point. SQE handles artists at all points in their
careers, from a seasoned and recently reunited act
like At the Drive-In down to the young Irish electronica
artist Mmoths, who was signed off a
YouTube demo and has barely an EP to his name.
For an artist like Rusko, who is beloved in serious
beat-music circles but who has also produced
for Britney Spears, Rihanna and T.I., SQE’s flexibility
is an asset in navigating an unconventional career.
“They do it all for me, or at least figure out how to
get it done. Many times, they’ll take initiatives and
bring cool opportunities that I didn’t even think
about,” he said, highlighting SQE’s recent work
with Cat Stone of Stone Management, a filmplacement
and promotions firm. In a music business
defined by decimated record sales, that creativity
is essential _ even for an artist who headlined
the 3,800-capacity Hollywood Palladium to
rapturous crowds. “In one week, I’ll play to more
kids in the U.S. than have bought my first album. I
have only received one royalty check in my life,
and it equaled the same amount as two months of
my T-shirt sales.”
After a brief signing spree in which the firm
snapped up promising young electronica acts
Audrey Napoleon and Data Romance alongside
locals L.A. Riots and Daniel Ahearn & the Jones,
Webber is ready to dive into the details of making
careers. He was about to fly to Texas to join Rusko
_ one of the few clients he personally manages _
on the road for the Western leg of his U.S. tour. But
he was eager to get back to L.A. For him, SQE has
become as much a space for music-management
creativity as much as it is for any of his artists.
“When you become a home where artists can
explore, eventually you’re going to get an Andy
Warhol,” he said. “But you can’t just go out and buy
an Andy Warhol.” —MCT