The Museum of the Moving Image will honor Tom Cruise at its annual fund-raising black-tie dinner, to be held on Nov. 6 at Cipriani 42nd Street. Rochelle Slovin, the museum’s director, said in a statement: “Tom Cruise is one of the premier American actors of his generation. Working with the great directors of our time — Paul Thomas Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Michael Mann, Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Pollack, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and now Robert Redford — Cruise has given us indelible characters and performances.” The evening will include remarks by friends of Mr. Cruise and scenes from his films. (New York Times)

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The official Lions for Lambs site is up!

Lions for Lambs movie site

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I’ve added some new pictures:
Basketball Game (Beverly Hills – March 12, 2006)
Baseball Game (L.A. – March 10, 2006)
Soccer Game (L.A. – January 15, 2006)
On the set of Mission Impossible 3 (L.A. – October 9, 2005)
On the set of Mission Impossible 3 (LA – October 2, 2005)
Holland – Promoting Lions for Lambs
Added one picture for each of these:
Tom & Suri leaving the Eden Roch Hotel – June 22, 2007
On the set of Mad Money
Thanks to katie-holmes.org!

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Washington, July 5 (ANI): Director Ken Russell has taken a swipe at Germany’s Defence Ministry for banning Scientologist actor Tom Cruise from filming ‘Valkyrie’ at military sites.

The film is about Claus Schenk Graf Von Stauffenberg who led the Operation Valkyrie assassination plot that tried to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.

Cruise has been turned down by the Finance Ministry to shoot the film at a Defence Ministry building, Bendlerblock, in Berlin.

The iconoclastic director insisted that the officials are unnecessarily bringing in the actor’s personal beliefs and are forgetting that he is working so hard to make a film on the German hero.

“It seems stretching it to make Cruise take the flak for his philosophy of choice while he seeks, with all sincerity and a huge amount of resources, to promote Germany’s favourite son. Give the guy a break,” Contactmusic quoted Russell, as saying.

Russell quipped that Hollywood actors are known as ‘eccentric and daredevil weirdos’, so Scientology should not be hyped so much.

“Everybody knows Hollywood types are eccentric and daredevil weirdos, don’t they? Where’s the news in that?” he added.

Reports had earlier said that the Scientology wary country had banned Cruise from filming the thriller at German military sites due to his religion.

UA chief exec Paula Wagner in a statement however insisted that Cruise’s ‘personal beliefs have absolutely no bearing’ on the movie.

Cruise is set to play Stauffenberg in the film, who planted a bomb in a briefcase near Hitler at his military headquarters in Rastenburg on July 20, 1944, but while the bomb exploded and killed several officers, Hitler himself narrowly escaped death, thanks to a large oak table in the room that saved him.

Stauffenberg was caught and executed that night at Bendlerblock, as were 7,000 other sympathizers. (ANI) (Source: Yahoo India)

Read the entire article here.

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By Erik Kirschbaum
Thu Jul 5, 8:29 AM ET

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German film fund said on Thursday it will grant subsidies worth 4.8 million euros ($6.5 million) for a controversial new film in which Tom Cruise plays a German hero executed for trying to kill Hitler.

Despite a row about the film’s thwarted efforts to use a memorial site where the Nazis shot Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF), administered by the Federal Film Board (FFA), has endorsed the subsidy.

“Yes, it’s been approved,” said Christine Berg, DFFF project head at the FFA. “The application was submitted, the criteria for the grant were fulfilled and the project was approved.”

The subsidies are available to any film as long as a German-based producer is involved and certain percentages of the costs fall in Germany.

The grant, from a new 60 million euro annual subsidy budget set up this year, exceeds the total cost of most German films.

One of the officials said the grant should allay fears that Germany is fundamentally opposed to Cruise playing Stauffenberg because of the actor’s membership of Scientology.

The government regards Scientology as a cult masquerading as a religion to make money, a view its leaders reject.

Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung has said the filmmakers cannot shoot at any military sites as long as Cruise plays the lead role, and Stauffenberg’s eldest son had said he does not want Cruise to portray his father.

However the Finance Ministry, which controls state properties, has said filming is generally banned at the “Bendlerblock” — the site of the conspirators’ execution and now a national shrine within the Defense Ministry complex — because of a bad experience with a German filmmaker.

“Valkyrie” — named after the plot’s codename — is due to begin filming at locations in Berlin on July 18. The film is being directed by Bryan Singer and due for release in 2008.

Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators were shot after failing to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb on July 20, 1944. (Source: Yahoo)

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Germany has thwarted Tom Cruise’s plan to make a film about the Second World War plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler for a second time in a move that provoked angry protests from the country’s current Oscar-winning director.

Berlin police refused yesterday to allow the actor and controversial Church of Scientology member to use a police station in the city’s Kreuzberg district to shoot his film, Valkyrie, in which he plays Claus von Stauffenberg, a member of the German nobility who tried to kill Hitler in 1944.

A police statement said the presence of a film crew on the site would hamper the activities of police “so seriously” that permission to use the station as a location could not be granted.

It was the second time that Cruise was refused permission to use a Berlin location to shoot his film. Last week, the German Defence Ministry banned the actor from setting foot on key military sites in the German capital that were to have featured in the production. The ministry said the actor’s membership of the Church of Scientology was the reason behind the ban, and insisted that the makers of the film would not be allowed on its premises “if Count von Stauffenberg is played by Tom Cruise, who has publicly professed to being a member of the Scientology cult”.

Germany’s attempts to thwart Cruise were angrily criticised yesterday by Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, the Oscar-winning German director of the film Other People’s Lives, which graphically depicts the spying techniques of the Stasi, the former secret police force in Communist East Germany.

Writing in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, Von Donnersmarck said Cruise’s role as Stauffenberg would “improve Germany’s international image more than 10 World Cup football tournaments”. He added: “The biggest star of the (Second World War) victor nations is not good enough to play our superman Stauffenberg, if this star’s convictions are not exactly in line with those of Germany.”

Germany treats Scientology with suspicion and keeps it under surveillance. MPs have stated publicly that, although it is not banned, they regard the organisation as a cult which recruits impressionable young people and is bent on making money.

Antje Blumethal, a German conservative, defended the ban yesterday, saying: “If we had given permission to film to a leading Scientologist it would have amounted to official recognition for the sect.”

Cruise’s production company has protested and maintains that the actor is ideally suited to play Stauffenberg, a wartime army officer who became a hero in post-war Germany for attempting to assassinate Hitler with a suitcase bomb. The Nazi leader was wounded but survived and Stauffenberg was shot dead by firing squad shortly after the plot was uncovered.

The ban on Cruise has met with incomprehension in the United States. The Philadelphia Daily News was reported in Germany to have remarked in an editorial yesterday: “It would be difficult to find a better way of recalling the Nazi era than by preventing a man from doing his job because of his beliefs.” (The Independant)

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COLOGNE, Germany — Oscar-winning director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has come out in support of Tom Cruise playing would-be Hitler assassin Col. Claus von Stauffenberg in Bryan Singer’s “Valkyrie.”

The project, set to begin shooting this month at Germany’s Studio Babelsberg, has been surrounded by controversy. German politicians have criticized the decision to cast Cruise in the lead role because he is a Scientologist, a religion seen in Germany as a dangerous sect.

After a long back and forth, the German authorities also banned Cruise and Singer from shooting “Valkyrie” on location at the Bendlerblock memorial in Berlin. It is the actual location where Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators hatched the plot to assassinate Hitler with a bomb hidden in a briefcase. It is also where Stauffenberg and the other plotters were executed after the attempt failed.

But in a long op-ed piece for German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Tuesday, Henckel von Donnersmarck said Cruise was the ideal person to play one of Germany’s few Hitler-era heroes.

“Tom Cruise is the most successful of all the (Hollywood) superstars,” Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote. “His superstar light will illuminate this rare shining moment in the darkest chapter of our history. In doing so, he will do more to improve Germany’s international image than 10 soccer World Cups could.”

Henckel von Donnersmarck said the story of Stauffenberg is almost unknown outside of Germany and that his country should be grateful a star with Cruise’s drawing power has chosen it as his next project.

Henckel von Donnersmarck is well acquainted with the delicate politics of adapting German history. His Stasi drama “The Lives of Others” was an international boxoffice hit, but he had to publicly defend every casting and wardrobe decision made in adapting the reality of communist East Berlin to the screen.

Despite the political opposition to Cruise, “Valkyrie” is deep into preproduction in Berlin and expected to begin shooting at Studio Babelsberg this month. (HollywoodReporter)

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We here at TomCruiseFan.com wish Tom all the best on his birthday! Much love, peace and health for him and his family!

We love you Tom!

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Mon Jul 2, 7:41 AM ET

Los Angeles (E! Online) – Germany doesn’t care if Tom Cruise is a Scientologist or not—but he still can’t film his movie at their military memorial.

The German Finance Ministry confirmed Monday that it would not grant the makers of the upcoming WWII film Valkyrie permission to shoot at the Bendlerblock, the site where war hero Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was executed after a failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944.

However, the decision has nothing to do with Cruise—who portrays Stauffenberg–being a Scientologist, Finance Ministry spokesman Stefan Olbermann told Reuters. He said only one filmmaker had ever been granted permission to shoot at the Bendlerblock, which is located within the Defense Ministry complex. The experience led the ministry to ban all future shoots.
“They will not be permitted to film at the Bendlerblock but this has nothing to do with [Scientology],” Olbermann told Reuters.
“We welcome the fact that such a film is being made,” he added. “We don’t think it would be appropriate to film there.”

The Berlin studio in charge of securing locations for the film said it was not concerned by the ban, as part of the Bendlerblock memorial is operated by German Resistance Memorial Center and they can shoot there.
“They have given us permission like they have done for other Stauffenberg films before,” Carl Woebken, head of Babelsberg Studios, said in a statement. “From our point of view, everything is ready to go.”

Germany’s official stance on Scientology has apparently softened since last week, when a Defense Ministry spokesman said the makers of Valkyrie would be forbidden to shoot at any military sites as long as Cruise starred as Stauffenberg because the actor had “publicly professed to being a member of the Scientology cult.”
Cruise’s producing partner, Paula Wagner, fired back with a statement that the actor’s “personal beliefs have absolutely no bearing on the movie’s plot, themes, or content.”
“Even though we could shoot the movie anywhere in the world, we believe Germany is the only place we can truly do the story justice,” she said.

The ministry later revised its position, stating it would “look agreeably” on an application from the film’s producers to shoot in Germany.

Olbermann said the Finance Ministry was still reviewing the filmmakers’ request to shoot at other sites, but that it had not received any requests to film at military sites.

The film takes its name from Operation Valkyrie, the codename for Stauffenberg’s plot to assassinate Hilter with a briefcase bomb on July 20, 1944. Bryan Singer is directing and Kenneth Branagh costars. (Yahoo News, EOnline

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Hélène send me a link to a YouTube video of Tom in Amsterdam! Click here to watch it. Thanks Hélène!

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