VIDEO: Ring Within the Year with New Girl Zooey Deschanel and Frederick Gordon-Levitt

Zooey Deschanel and Frederick Gordon-Levitt Because of the prosperity of New Girl, Zooey Deschanel had a significant banner year. Now 2011's most "adorkable" TV star wants to be aware what you are doing to celebrate the beginning of 2012. Inside a video published by Deschanel herself, the actress and she or he and Him singer reunites together with her (500) Times of Summer time co-star Frederick Gordon-Levitt to have an acoustic duet entitled "What's Happening New Year's Eve?" Discover the shocking truth here: Would you need to spend new year's eve with Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt? (Yeah, enter line.)

'Dragon Tattoo' Clips: When Blomkvist Met Salander

by Lauren Kearney It is time to show from the Christmas music and set lower your charge cards: "The Lady Using the Dragon Tattoo" hits theaters today. And you have to take a look, most famously before MTV referred to it as the very best movie of 2011. But when a visit to the movies does not appear to stay in them today, do not worry. We have a couple of clips to help keep you up to date. Within this first clip, Mikael Blomkvist first meets Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist gives Salander a run on her money, after barging into her apartment and stifling a hookup session (awkward), crossing limitations that Salander doesn't take well. Here you receive an up-close-and-personal ending up in Salander, who despite her "different" appearance is the best investigator. She walks in, clad in leather, indicators along with a mohawk, blunt by having an "I do not provide a s--t" attitude, essentially declaring that boss how it's. It provides you with just a little concept of who you will be coping with through the movie. Throughout Blomkvist's first ending up in Henrik Vanger, that old guy provides the journalist an idea concerning the analysis where he's going to embark. Vanger shows him his display of presented flowers he's collected through the years, the very first bunch from his niece and also the relaxation, he assumes, from the one who killed her. Salander is definitely an investigative genius, in a position to search up grime in your soul that nobody however your own mother knows. Within this clip, Blomkvist confronts Salanders boss, Dragan Armansky, and asks how Salander could discover certain details about him and why none of her details are on file, threatening him having a suit. Armansky discloses that they is really a warden from the condition and asks him to not make her existence any harder of computer already is. Inform us that which you think about the "Dragon Tattoo" clips within the comments section as well as on Twitter!

Take part in the Hunger Games Puzzle Challenge!

Hunger Games The Hunger Games movie is 100 days away and also to get fans excited, TVGuide.com is taking part within the Hunger Games 100 Poster Puzzle Search! Below you will find puzzle piece No. 94 that are obtainable on this link. The choice is yours to gather all 100 - which is distributed on various sites. (Hint: Search Twitter using the hash tag #HungerGames100) Once you have collected the pieces, place them together and upload the photo on Facebook, make certain to tag the Hunger Games Official Movie Page. VIDEO: Watch the very first full-length trailer for that Hunger Games The Hunger Games, a Lionsgate film, hits theaters March 23.

Efron's Pfeiffer Crush, Swank's De Niro Moment, and 7 Other Revelations from the New Year's Eve Junket

With the year 2011 drawing to a close, the stars of Garry Marshall’s New Year’s Eve were a sentimental — and cheeky — bunch talking up the portmanteau rom-com recently in Los Angeles. “When I stopped wanting my New Year’s Eve to be perfect, to ring in the New Year right, is when it started working out right,” admitted Hilary Swank, seated at a podium about as long as the credit roll for the star-studded holiday pic. At the other end of the panel, Zac Efron faux-wooed co-star Michelle Pfeiffer. “You’re coming out with me this year,” he winked at her. “I’ll show you how we do it.” Like the wide-ranging press conference itself, New Year’s Eve is jam-packed with an assortment of stars (Sarah Jessica Parker! Halle Berry! Yeardley Smith!) a la Valentine’s Day, director Marshall’s first effort in the holiday-themed ensemble franchise. Just try and guess which disparate plot threads will run into another as a host of NYers from all walks of life (A bike messenger! A rock star! The lady in charge of dropping the ball at midnight!) despair, rejoice, and collide on the biggest night of the year. The unifying theme, of course, is self-reflection and hope for the future, and the idea that on New Year’s Eve, everyone in the world is sharing the same experience. Even, it seems, Hollywood’s biggest stars. Read on to find out who’ll be watching the ball drop in their jammies just like you this year. 1. Worst. New Year’s Eve. Ever? (Or, how to have a better time with lowered expectations.) The stars and filmmakers agree: Manage your expectations of the big night and you’ll be much happier when midnight rolls around. “When I stopped wanting my New Year’s Eve to be perfect, to ring in the New Year right, is when it started working out right,” said Swank. “I always found when I was young I was looking for the next best party to be at to ring in the new year and I always ended up in a car going, ‘Happy New Year.’” Marshall added his own disappointing New Year’s memory: “I got to kiss the girl I really liked… and she turned around and kissed seven other people. Not a good night.” 2. Ever hear master raconteur Hector Elizondo tell one of his stories? Here’s your chance. “I think that restriction leads to imagination, and imagination leads to reinvention. Having everything you want is not a good thing, usually. Usually what you want is not good for you anyway.” “I did have one lousy New Year’s, because I expected something from it, you see. I used to be a jazz musician; I was playing with a quintet and this was in the days of rocks and caves, before they knew the world was round. We had our jazz quintet… anybody heard of Carl Tjader? Four people, OK. Piano, vibes, conga, bass, timbales. Very hip, beautiful group. And we had a gig! New Year’s Eve was the big gig, that’s when you made $50! So we got to go to a place called Greenwich, CT… we usually gigged around NY City and the environs, the metropolitan area. People knew how to dance on two, as they say in NY. You know what ‘Dance on two’ means? [Silence] O-K! So we’re here in Greenwich, CT and we kick it off: [Makes jazz percussion sounds] Great little mambo, man. It was a trolley song, great little arrangement. And it was like an oil painting, looking at us. I realized, ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.’ We’re not in Harlem. We kept on playing our best tunes, man, and nothing. Not a foot tap, nothing, they just kept staring at us. Until we finally said, ‘OK, get out the brushes.’ The timbale player got out the brushes. We started playing Lawrence Welk, everybody danced! By the end of the evening they were snookered, they were doing a conga line, which is about as corny as can be, but smashed they would dance to anything. [Pause] That was a big letdown for us.” 3. Working with Robert De Niro was on Hilary Swank’s ‘bucket list,’ but going deep Method with him in a scene didn’t quite turn out as expected. “I got to work with Robert De Niro, and for me he’s on my bucket list, he’s at the top of the people I have to work with before it’s all said and done,” Swank explained. “So I got to check that off.” Walking into her first scene with the legendary De Niro, Swank felt an intense connection as they plunged into character. “I’m just trying to get a sense of the vibe. I walk in and Robert’s in the bed. He’s kind of laying there. I hear he’s Method; you hear all this stuff about Robert De Niro, and this is a comedy, but he’s dying! Their eyes meet. They get into the mood. “I’m going deep with De Niro!” Until… his head snaps up, and he asks for a coffee. “And I realized, ‘Oh my god, he was sleeping!’” 4. Lea Michele, who spent two weeks working in an elevator with Ashton Kutcher, came home to research world news every night so they’d have something to talk about. “He’s really smart and would talk about everything going on in the world, which I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. So I would go home and Google everything and try to brush up on everything that’s going on in our world and come in the next day and try to have a conversation.” 5. In the middle of the press conference, Zac Efron betrays his longtime crush on Hairspray co-star Michelle Pfeiffer, who convinced him to come onboard New Year’s Eve by suggesting a very enticing script tweak. “I met Michelle a few years ago doing Hairspray, and had a huge crush on her from Day One. Back then I was very, very young and very bashful, and around her I tended to put my foot in my mouth a lot. I didn’t really know what to say to her and everything just came out wrong. It was like, ‘Do you want to rehearse… the scene?’ I didn’t know what to do, I was very shy. But then I got to talk on the phone with [Pfeiffer] about this part, and she said ‘I think we should take this to the next level… let’s get a kiss in there.’ And I was like, ‘I’m in. I’m in this movie! Sign me up.’ [Efron turns to Pfeiffer] Every second with you was amazing. 6. When it comes to New Year’s Eve plans, stars are just like us! Meaning they drink champagne at home in their PJs and fall asleep early. Michele will be watching the 5K marathon in Central Park, as she does every year. “I did the Times Square thing once, and I’ll never do it again.” Swank will have an even more low-key evening: “While Lea and those other people are running, I’m eating pie and drinking champagne. I stopped trying to chase the perfect place to be and realized the perfect place is with your loved ones and your closest friends, around a dinner table, talking about the past year and the year to come and the things that you want to change in your life, hearing their stories and what you’d like to see happen in the world… and I never make it to midnight. Ever.” Pfeiffer has the right idea: “I celebrate New Year’s at 9pm West Coast time. I watch the ball drop in my jammies with some champagne, maybe some pie… I stopped setting those unrealistic expectations for New Year’s Eve many years ago.” …but this year, Efron might shake things up: “We’re gonna change that. You’re coming out with me this year… I’ll show you how we do it, Michelle.” 7. Meanwhile, Abigail Breslin’s mom will not let her spend New Year’s Eve in Times Square unsupervised. “I don’t think that’s going to be happening any time soon.” 8. Read what you will into this Hilary Swank reflection on New Year’s optimism in light of the year she’s had (i.e. Attending that Chechan human rights offender party and the PR nightmare that followed): “The idea of this woman who takes her job really seriously and is responsible, I felt very in touch with that. I take a lot of things pretty seriously. But I also love that speech that I have, because it’s certainly universal. I can’t imagine one person not thinking about the year that just passed and the optimism for the next year, and the idea of being able to have a second chance to be a better person. To love more, and to forgive. Essentially that’s life in a nutshell, right in that monologue.” 9. Finally, enjoy yet more Efron-on-Pfeiffer flirting as the charismatic young Efron waxes poetic about their big kiss. “Every actor performs three scenes: There’s the one you rehearse the night before, in your bedroom. There’s the one you actually get to do when you’re filming. And there’s the one you wish you would have done afterward. I was in my hotel room the night before imagining how I was going to kiss [Pfeiffer], and it was awesome. I was the man, in every way. It was glorious. Confetti started to come up, the wind swept up, newspapers, there was electricity, a big dip. I went to execute on the day, and right when I came to the crucial moment… a huge piece of confetti flew into my mouth. It was everywhere. It was in our eyes.” Pfeiffer: “It wasn’t sexy.” Efron: “Yes, it was! [Pause] I thought it was awesome.”

Ken Russell Was Hoping to Remake 1976 X-Rated Alice Musical... with Lady Gaga

When the late filmmaker Ken Russell passed away last week at the age of 84, he’d been planning to remake the infamous 1976 X-rated Alice in Wonderland musical in which Alice is taken on a tour of Wonderland by a randy White Rabbit. Ahem. And who had Russell hoped to bring along on his naughty trip down the rabbit hole? Lady Gaga, of course! Well, kinda; The Guardian reports that Russell, according to producers who are still moving forward with the project, had hoped to bring Gaga and Rihanna aboard to contribute songs to the musical, penned by composer Simon Boswell. Roger Daltry, who starred in Russell’s film adaptation of The Who’s Tommy, had been asked to play the Mad Hatter; is it much of a stretch to envision Lady Gaga as the White Rabbit, guiding young Alice along in an erotic romp through Wonderland? The producers are currently seeking a new director to take over from Russell, who left behind a near-complete script. More details over at The Guardian, but in the meantime, check out a peek at the infamous 1976 Alice (Sample ditty: “What’s a nice girl like you doing/on a knight like me?”) for a taste of the raunchy fantasy that inspired the project: Raunchy Alice musical could be Ken Russell’s final legacy [Guardian]

Magic Johnson to Bid to Buy Los Angeles Dodgers

This article appears in the Dec. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.our editor recommendsThe Making of Steven Spielberg's 'War Horse'From 'The Artist' to 'War Horse,' 23 Awards Contenders That Prominently Feature Animals (Photos)'War Horse': Newest Trailer Heavy on Orchestration, Heartstring Pulling (Video)'War Horse' Star Jeremy Irvine to Play Young Colin Firth in 'The Railway Man' (Exclusive)Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson: The Titans Behind 'The Adventures of Tintin' In October 2010, Steven Spielberg fell in a hole. "I was walking in a trench with my viewfinder and the crew following me, and all of a sudden I disappeared," recalls the director of the time when he was shooting War Horse just outside London. "It was a hole dug for explosive charges, and a storm had washed away the warning cones and filled it up. I was totally under ice water. I threw my hands over my head, and two big grips pulled me out." Now, 13 months after wrapping his World War I epic, Spielberg can laugh about "the murder hole." But that was only one of the challenges involved in bringing his movie to the screen, along with fighting freezing weather, dealing with an army of 5,800 extras and about 300 horses, and turning to filmmaker Peter Jackson for crucial wartime artifacts from his private collection -- all within a 63-day shoot and with an exceptionally tight $70 million budget ($65 million after tax breaks). PHOTOS: The Making of 'War Horse' Spielberg first heard about War Horse in the summer of 2009. That's when his longtime producer Kathleen Kennedy mentioned the West End adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's 1982 novel, which centers on a British horse named Joey that we follow from birth through four years of war. During that time, he is enlisted by the army, captured by Germans and hidden by French farmers, all while being trailed by Albert, the young Englishman who raised him. When Kennedy spoke of the project, Spielberg was on the scoring stage for The Adventures of Tintin. Having finished 31 days of motion-capture work, he was in a yearlong holding pattern until animation was completed and he could return to the film. To his surprise, he discovered that the book's movie rights had not been optioned, so Kennedy flew to England, where she had breakfast with Morpurgo, then hired Billy Elliot scribe Lee Hall to craft an initial draft. COVER STORY: Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson -- The Titans Behind 'Tintin' "What was irresistible for me had nothing to do with global war," says Spielberg. "It was how Joey linked disparate characters together and the length to which Albert went to find him." After working briefly with Hall, Spielberg moved on to a second writer, Four Weddings and a Funeral's Richard Curtis, in an attempt to bring the screenplay closer to the book. Curtis was nervous: He'd met Spielberg only once before, at France's César Awards in 1995, when the presenter declared Spielberg's Schindler's List a masterpiece and said, "If any other film wins, it will be a disgrace to the honor of France" -- only for Four Weddings to pick up the best foreign film trophy. PHOTOS: Steven Spielberg on Set But Spielberg was more interested in the new picture, and he was clear it should focus on the horse -- like the novel, the movie was to be told from the horse's point of view -- rather than intercutting that story with the boy's. Curtis became convinced this would work when he read the book aloud to his 14-year-old daughter while she was in bed, awaiting an operation. "I found it hard to read the last 10 pages to her because they were so emotional," he recalls, declining to say more about the operation. "I thought immediately, 'If it works in the book, we can do it in the film.' " PHOTOS: 'The Adventures of Tintin' Now he moved fast, whipping through more than a dozen drafts in three months while conducting two-hour telephone conversations with Spielberg. On one occasion, he had to hide in a hospital medicine cabinet while discussing the script, "surrounded by syringes and pills, because I couldn't talk in my daughter's room." As he wrote, a research team plowed through troves of artifacts at England's Imperial War Museum, frequently copying photos that would be used to stage scenes. Spielberg was fascinated by their discoveries. "I was not prepared for how many millions of horses perished during the Great War -- it was over 4 million," he says. "And it wasn't all in close combat; a lot was just through malnutrition and mistreatment. But don't forget that the Humane Society was born out of the First World War, and it was a huge turning point in technological warfare that supplanted the horse once and forever." PHOTOS: 23 Awards Contenders Featuring Animals In addition to the material his researchers found, Spielberg drew on an unexpected source: his Tintin producer Jackson, who collects war memorabilia. "He's even got about 15 working biplanes, which we didn't need," marvels Spielberg. "He sent about three cargo containers to the U.K., free of charge. He pretty much lent me his entire World War I collection." As all of that fell into place, a critical matter loomed: finding the right actor to play Albert, who ages from 15 to 21. "I looked for months and months," says Spielberg. "I was running out of hope, then Jeremy Irvine came in toward the last third of the casting process." There was one snag: The 20-year-old Irvine's most extensive acting experience had been playing a tree in the chorus of the Royal Shakespeare Company. "I had a couple of months of going in to audition two or three times a week, sometimes doing videotape and knowing it would be shown to Steven," he says. "It was quite intense." Weeks after his first audition, adds Irvine: "I got a call at about 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., saying, 'Can you meet Steven for tea in a hotel in London tomorrow morning?' I did what any actor would do: I freaked out." He won the role regardless, and shooting commenced Aug. 6, 2010, in Dartmoor, in the south of England. Production designer Rick Carter had searched for British locations that would be convincing, such as the bucolic farm where Joey's story begins and the no-man's-land where the war is fought. A crew of 750 worked ferociously so each location would be ready when filming took place. Operations revolved around seven locales, ranging from the untamed moors of Dartmoor to a derelict airfield in Surrey, England (where land could be dug up to look like a battlefield) to the Duke of Wellington's storied estate west of London. Each had its share of difficulties. In Dartmoor, a nature preserve, the land couldn't be touched. "We had to put down netting and bring the dirt in and plant what looked like rocks and dig into that," says Carter. The appalling weather created some "nail-biting situations," he adds. Right before the shoot, a terrific storm blew away part of a thatched roof on Albert's farmhouse -- in actuality, made of Styrofoam. "We had to have a crew repaint it every day because it was falling apart," Carter notes. For one shot, in which men and horses emerge like ghosts from a field of reeds, the plants were moved from another part of the country and set in place individually. "There was a marsh somewhere in the south of London still in bloom; we went there and paid a farmer to cut his whole field down, then we put the reeds in Styrofoam." Even the 250 yards of trenches Carter dug, which might seem a simple task but involved laying down an infrastructure to keep them in place and allow tracking shots, required six weeks of preparation alone. "It was like a construction site, with 20 Caterpillars running around," he says. Creating clothing for the men who would inhabit those locations was no easier. "[Costume supervisor] Dave Crossman would trawl through eBay, seeing what we could get -- the hardware and the insignias," says costume designer Joanna Johnston, a longtime Spielberg collaborator. Beyond the beauty of the uniforms, she was surprised at the real-life parallels she discovered with the movie. "The great-grandfather of a girl who worked with us was a milkman whose horse was taken during the war -- and amazingly, the horse made it back," she says. As far as the present horses were concerned, Kennedy brought one huge advantage: Having produced 2003's Seabiscuit, she knew the ins and outs of working with equines. "That was one of the biggest departments on the film, with 200 to 300 people," she says of the animal unit. "You'd sometimes have as many as 180 to 280 horses in a scene. You'd have groomers and drivers to haul the horses and the feed, people to set up portable barns, vets and everyone else who handled the tack and the horses' makeup." Fourteen horses in all played Joey, the most prominent being one named Finder, which had starred in Seabiscuit. "We had bought horses for Seabiscuit, then we sold them -- and Bobby Lovgren, our lead trainer, bought Finder," says Kennedy. "He turned out to be one of the best horses Bobby had ever worked with, so he brought Finder with him to England." Except for one notable shot in which the horse stumbles and falls into a trench, most of the work was done without CGI effects. That added pressure to the shoot, as did the ever-changing British weather. "It was unbelievably rainy and cold," says Kennedy. "Even when you had your wellies on, sometimes you'd just take a step and one would be left stuck in the mud. It was freezing and raining, but then there would be these amazing skies and the whole crew would stop and gaze out at the landscape because it was so beautiful." Moments like these vanished during the hardest part of filming, when the trench warfare took place. "As soon as your big woolen uniform gets wet, the weight is unbelievable," says Irvine, "and you'd be running across no-man's-land, right through the mud and dirt. There were sequences where explosions would take place next to me and three or four stuntmen would fly through the air -- and then there'd be other scenes where you're just soaking wet. I got trench foot [a medical condition contracted through lengthy contact with dampness]. The soldiers used to get it all the time. And then there were the rats." Several dozen rodents were released into the trenches with the actors, much to their horror. But the rats were even more of a nightmare for the producers. "When you put mud on a rat, it immediately starts to clean itself. We could never keep them covered in mud," says Kennedy with a laugh. Shooting wrapped Oct. 27, 2010, following five days of studio work. Audiences will see the finished movie when Disney releases it domestically on Christmas Day through its distribution pact with DreamWorks, which financed the film through its partnership with Reliance Entertainment. (The picture unfurls internationally starting Dec. 26 in Australia.) The U.S. opening comes four days after the Dec. 21 North American release of Tintin, which already has proved an international blockbuster. In some ways, War Horse is more important for DreamWorks -- Tintin, a joint venture between Sony and Paramount, wasn't financed by the company. The former's success is critical for the studio, which has had some recent disappointments along with one megahit, The Help. Spielberg says he'll cherish the memories of making the film -- the tenderness of working with the horses, the miracle of the sunsets and the chance to bring history to life -- despite all the obstacles he encountered. "The thing about filming is, [almost] everything goes wrong," he says. "It's using the parts that go right in the finished film that counts." PHOTO GALLERY: View Gallery The Making of Steven Spielberg's 'War Horse' Related Topics Steven Spielberg International Kathleen Kennedy War Horse Awards Season Preview

Sony Releasing ups Adrian Smith

Adrian Smith has been upped to exec VP and general sales manager at Sony Pictures Releasing.Smith will report to Jim Amos, prexy of Sony Pictures Releasing.In his new role, Smith -- in concert with Amos and worldwide distribution prexy Rory Bruer -- will oversee the domestic sales of all Sony Pictures films. He's currently working with exhibitors to book such titles as Columbia Pictures' "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," "Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance," "21 Jump Street," "Men in Black 3," "I Hate You Dad," "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "Total Recall," as well as Screen Gems' "Underworld Awakening," "The Vow" and "Think Like a Man.""Adrian has been a respected member of our sales and distribution team for more than 20 years," Amos said. "He has been crucial to our success with a wealth of knowledge and experience that few can match. As we look ahead to 2012 and beyond, our exhibition partners are as excited as we are about our upcoming slate of films and we look forward to relying on Adrian's skills as we bring this high-profile slate to the marketplace.""I could not be more pleased to have Adrian in this new role," added Bruer. "He has made me look good for years at TriStar and Sony Pictures Western Division, and he continues to be the consummate professional."Smith is a veteran of hundreds of release campaigns, having joined the studio's TriStar Pictures in 1989 as Western district manager. He later became managing director -- West for Sony Pictures Releasing and since 2000 has served as SPR's senior VP and Western division manager. Prior to joining the studio, Smith held posts at 20th Century Fox and Cannon Releasing. He began his career at Mann's Westwood theaters, then joined United Artists Releasing in 1979, starting as a booker before becoming the Detroit branch manager. Contact Jeff Sneider at jeff.sneider@variety.com