Travolta attorney says he warned
Bahamas defendant
NASSAU, Bahamas - A lawyer for John Travolta testified Thursday that he warned a former Bahamas senator she would not get away with an alleged scheme to extort $25 million from the movie star, and even wore a wire to secretly record their conversations.
Attorney Michael McDermott said the defendant, Pleasant Bridgewater, contacted him by telephone and demanded the money on behalf of a paramedic who had treated the actor's 16-year-old son, Jett, following a seizure that led to his death.
The pair allegedly threatened to go to the media with a consent form that the actor signed to have his autistic son taken to an airport and flown to the U.S. for treatment. Travolta later changed his mind and Jett died at a local hospital Jan. 2.
Bridgewater and the paramedic, Tarino Lightbourne, have pleaded not guilty to extortion charges at the trial that began Sept. 21.
McDermott said he told Bridgewater, a former Bahamas senator who allegedly negotiated with the actor's lawyers for the medic, during the Jan. 12 phone conversation that she was committing a crime.
"I then told her: 'You are playing a very dangerous game, lady. I do not assent to your demands. I will go to the police,'" McDermott said.
Regardless of the threat of a police investigation, Bridgewater kept contacting him with Lightbourne's demands, McDermott testified. He told jurors that Bridgewater told him the paramedic would accept $15 million.
"She indicated that this was the bottom line and she indicated that she was ready to receive the funds. I told her I would get back to her," McDermott told the jury.
Wearing a wire as part of a sting he set up with Bahamian police, McDermott told her that Travolta would pay her $10 million in installments over a four-year period. The conversation was in his hotel room, where hidden video cameras had also been installed by investigators.
The pair finally agreed to this figure, McDermott testified. He said Bridgewater e-mailed him instructions on where to electronically transfer the money. The e-mail and the videotapes were entered into evidence.
Animal rights group wants Tornatore film blocked (Reuters)
The head of the National Association for Animal Protection (ENPA), Carla Rocchi, filed a complaint saying the scene in Italy's film choice for the Academy Awards -- in which the bull is first struck with an ice pick and then has its throat slit while still alive -- amounted to "senseless cruelty."
ENPA also asked that Tornatore, whose 1988 movie "Cinema Paradiso" won a foreign film Oscar, be prosecuted.
Baaria, which premiered last month at the Venice film festival and has just been released in Italy, is a big-budget, sentimental sweep through 20th century Sicily, taking in Fascism, war, Communism and the Mafia.
Tornatore, who based the film partly on his own memories of life in his native Sicily, said this week the bull scene was shot in a slaughterhouse in Tunisia after an attempt to recreate it with computer images proved ineffective.
"It's a very brief, documentary-like scene in a fiction film," Tornatore told Corriere della Sera daily.
A spokesman for film producers Medusa told Reuters: "Tornatore did not create that scene for the film, he simply filmed the killing of a bull."
Hollywood flair visits impoverished Miss. Delta (AP)
RULEVILLE, Miss. - Luster Bayless' life reads like a Hollywood script: The son of a dirt-poor Mississippi sharecropper who hitchhiked his way West a half-century ago and carved a niche in Tinseltown.
Bayless became a costumer for actor John Wayne and opened a respected warehouse for period-piece wardrobe, United American Costume Co. Now, he's reopened a museum in his hometown of Ruleville to showcase the costumes worn by a galaxy of stars, from Errol Flynn to Brad Pitt.
He's hoping the museum will become another tourist attraction in the Delta, a poverty-stricken region known for its blues music and civil rights history.
Bayless said he's also trying to protect the clothing from being destroyed by time and neglect.
Swiss ex-minister: Polanski should've been warned (AP)
Switzerland's former justice minister says Swiss authorities should have warned Roman Polanski he was facing an international arrest warrant before he came to the country.
Christoph Blocher says on his Web site it was wrong for Polanski to be arrested as he arrived for a government-backed festival that invited him to receive an award.
Blocher said Friday the Swiss could have legally warned the 76-year-old director first.
Blocher was ousted as justice minister at the end of 2007, after helping the nationalist People's Party become Switzerland's strongest.
He says his criticism is not a defense of Polanski's actions. He also distanced himself from those who want Polanski freed.
U.S. authorities want him extradited for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.
New film seeks answer to mystery of vanishing bees (Reuters)
"Vanishing of the Bees," which has a limited theatrical release in Britain from next week, follows the fate of a group of U.S. beekeepers hit by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which first struck in 2004 and made U.S. headlines three years later.
Countless bees would suddenly vanish, leaving an empty hive but few bodies, and the phenomenon has variously been linked to mites, disease, genetically modified crops, mobile phones and, in the words of one beekeeper, "PPB," or "piss-poor beekeeping."
While the cause has yet to be established, the film suggests there is a link to pesticides, and particularly those applied to seeds as opposed to sprayed on existing plants.
Other factors could also contribute, it added, including the fact that bees are being transported long distances to pollinate single crops, or monocultures, rather than producing honey.
The dominance of monocultures in U.S. agriculture means crops flower only once a year, and so cannot support indigenous insects. So devastating were the effects of CCD that beekeepers started shipping bees from Australia to meet U.S. demand.
U.S.-based directors George Langworthy and Maryam Henein argue that the problem goes beyond the disappearance of the insects. One third of everything we eat is pollinated by bees and without them farming could be thrown into chaos.
"They are one of our most ancient allies," Henein said in an interview in London. "We actually depend on honey bees to eat. May be out of selfishness it raises a red flag."
Langworthy added: "It's a broader issue about the system of agriculture. People are going to have to rethink it and maybe they don't want to. It really will have to be driven by the general public's call for change."
"FAITH AND CREDIT CARDS"
The film makers said they paid for the 90-minute documentary with a combination of their own money and outside funding.
"We started shooting here and there on the weekends, but once we started to learn about the story we realized it was of vital importance," Langworthy said of the $500,000 picture.
"We just went off on faith and credit cards. We felt this was hugely important and quit our jobs and put our all into it."
Vanishing of the Bees, which celebrates the honeybee and its contribution to our food supply, travels to France, where in 2004 the government restricted the use of Bayer CropScience's Gaucho insecticide on the grounds that it may harm bees.
A spokesman for the company, which features prominently in the movie, contested some of its findings.
"Where these products have been restricted (as in France) they have seen zero improvement," said Julian Little, spokesman for Bayer CropScience, a unit of German drugs and chemicals group Bayer AG.
"It is also true that the healthiest bees are in Australia, where they don't have the varroa mite but they do use a lot of neonicotinoid seed treatments. Neonicotinoids are safe when used properly. Let's not pretend this is an objective documentary."
Langworthy said changes to the way people farm in the United States would have to come from the public.
"I'm very optimistic, because when you look at the situation you could parallel it with global warming, which no one had ever heard of 10 years ago. We're on the cusp of this becoming a mirror of that progress in the system of agriculture."
Vanishing of the Bees opens in selected British theatres on October 9. Henein said she hoped for a U.S. release next spring.
"Transformers 3" confirmed for 2011 (Reuters)
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Ending a complete lack of suspense, director Michael Bay said Thursday that he will shoot a third "Transformers" film, whose release date has been brought forward by exactly one year to July 1, 2011.
Stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox are slated to return to the Paramount/DreamWorks project, as is Ehren Kruger, the co-writer of this year's hit sequel "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." The first two films have grossed more than $1.5 billion worldwide.
Bay wrote on his Web site that he met with George Lucas' ILM effects house in San Francisco Thursday morning, and then flew with Kruger to talk new characters with Hasbro executives in Rhode Island.
"Well, it's official: We have a great 'Transformers 3' story," Bay said on his Web site. "Today is Day One."
Paramount's summer 2011 is shaping up to have four tentpoles: Marvel features "Thor" and "First Avenger: Captain America" bow May 20 and July 22, respectively. And the DreamWorks Animation sequel "Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom" hits theaters June 3.
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