(Russian-dubbed version)
Paris Connections was actually filmed as an unrated romantic thriller with Nicole first nude scenes on-screen. Early rough cut flopped at a screening; leaving Jackie Collins seething in anger. She wanted her Madison Castelli to be sexually open but the early draft was too 'safe'. The two leads Nicole Steinwedell and Anthony Delon was called back to re-shoot the love scenes. One is a flashback scene, the main one at Delon's Jake Sica Paris apartment and third is a rather tame clothed make-out session. The flashback segment with Nicole walking bare-ass to the bedroom and tits displayed briefly. The Paris love scene was lengthy and torrid. You suppose to see extensive upper torso nudity by Nicole in post-coital interaction between the couple. Unfortunately the producers Tesco intervened at the last minute and told the film-makers to edit out the racy nude scenes involving Nicole and Anthony Delon. Toning it down to PG-13 and removing the flashback scene. Nicole was relieved her nudity was excised from the movie. The Floridian was regretting her decision to go naked but she was seduced by Paris and charmed into baring it all by Jackie Collins and super-hot Anthony Delon with words like 'tasteful nudity' and 'discreet' being thrown around. The married Nicole (to an Army guy?) also rumored to have sucked Delon's cock off the cam in brief torrid affair (gossiping on my part. Please don't sue me). It's Paris baby and anything goes!
https://rapidshare.com/files/5038640/NS-PC.rar
The UK's biggest food retailer is about to take on Hollywood in the movie-making business. Patrick Barkham goes on the Paris set of Tesco's first film, with Charles Dance and Trudie Styler
A glittering adaptation of a Jackie Collins novel. An award-winning cast. Thirteen gazelle-like models in a top Paris hotel. Viewed from one angle, Paris Connections could be the big-budget production to put the glamour back into British film-making. In a less flattering light – say, the strip lights of a supermarket – the end result could look very different.
Because this is not just any movie. This is a Tesco movie. The supermarket giant that inhabits virtually every corner of our existence has this year moved into film-making with a straight-to-DVD movie or, as its makers prefer, a "DVD Premiere". This autumn, Paris Connections will go on sale exclusively in Tesco stores. If successful, it could revolutionise the movie business, removing distributors and agents in one swipe and transforming how many films are made and funded.
Paris Connections is the first in a series of Collins adaptations, loosely based on her novel LA Connections, but transposed to Paris Fashion week. Today, in the Hotel Lutetia, the director Harley Cokeliss is shooting a catwalk scene. Many of the extras are authentic fashionistas: a man with wet-look leather trousers, plenty of big glasses and vertiginous heels. The effect is tarnished somewhat when I am hurriedly shepherded among them to make up the numbers.
"Une banane pour Trudie!" shouts a stressed-looking Englishwoman to the mostly French crew jostling in the doorway of Hotel Lutetia's ballroom. The hotel was a base for the Gestapo during the second world war. Now it is home to actor Charles Dance and Trudie Styler, actor, campaigner and wife of Sting. Styler is playing Olivia Kulikova, an icy assistant to Dance's creepy Russian fashion mogul. Fresh from her triumph at the Baftas the night before, where Duncan Jones's Moon, on which she worked as a producer, won the award for outstanding debut, Styler is having a tough day. Not only is there a paucity of bananas, but another group of the extras are catwalk photographers and Styler, who unerringly picks out the Guardian photographer among them, asks him if he is "papping" her. It is an odd question, given that he has been invited on to the set, but Styler is, as one senior member of the crew tells me, "incredibly shy of the press. They beat her up for some reason." Dance, who arches his eyebrows and grimaces affectionately at his co-stars between takes, is loyal. "She's terrific, is Trudie. She's a force to be reckoned with. She's no slouch as an actress and she involves herself in so many things."
Thankfully, the film's lead, Nicole Steinwedell, who plays an investigative journalist called Madison Castelli, is happy to chat. Steinwedell has never set foot in a Tesco ("I was told they were called Fresh and Easy in the States, and I have been in one of those. It's genius and it's very cost-effective") and did not have any time to research being a journalist. "I got the part six days before we started. For better or for worse, I didn't have time to get anxious about it," she says. "My spirit is a lot like a journalist – I'm curious, I speak my mind, all those things come naturally to me."
Before she left the States for Paris, she was invited to Collins's home. Collins is a producer on the project but, to Steinwedell at least, expressed some reservations about the screen version she collaborated on. "She said, 'I see things [in the script] like, "Madison gives a coy smile." Madison is never coy. You go in there and be strong. You do whatever you want and you tell them Jackie said you could, because that's why we hired you,'" Steinwedell recalls. Madison "is one of Jackie's favourite heroines. She's a tough cookie and she's smart and she's pretty," she says. "It's Murder She Wrote but clever, like Nancy Drew."Steinwedell has been filming for a "very unglamorous" US TV show called The Unit and is unfazed by the pace of shooting a feature in just 20 days. "I'm having such a good time it's ridiculous. It's been like a dream." Her big challenge in the final week is reshooting a sex scene with French co-star Anthony Delon. "For me it's very important because I'm a fairly new actress. In France, nobody cares – they're like, 'Just show your boobies.' For an American actress, once you go there, you can never go back, and I'm in no place to do that."Sex is, in fact, the only area where Tesco has intervened. There is no Tesco catering on set and no trace of product placement during the filming, not even a scene with a baddie hatching an evil plan over a glass of Sainsbury's own-brand lemonade. Did Tesco demand anything? "Did they have any creative input?" asks Lawrence Elman, one of the film's producers. "None. The only thing they asked us is not to make a porn movie. They've asked us to keep it PG15."
Making a straight-to-DVD movie sold exclusively in Tesco is the brainchild of Ileen Maisel, a former New Line Cinema producer who set up Amber Entertainment with Elman and two other producers a year ago. Her idea is to take well-known authors and turn their bestselling novels into what they describe as "video books".
"The film industry needs to recognise that the paradigm has changed," says Maisel, an American-born producer who is a refreshingly no-nonsense presence on the set. "Our responsibility is to provide different kinds of content to the consumer. The old prejudice of straight-to-DVD just being a B kind of movie should be thrown out. A DVD premiere is a new, exciting way for customers and audiences to see different kinds of product."
Paris Connections is their first project, and they hope to make two more films this year. As well as Collins, they've signed up Philip Pullman, Judy Blume and Felix Francis. Francis has adapted the screenplay for Dead Heat, the novel he co-wrote with his late father Dick. Blume is adapting her teen novel Tiger Eyes – Tesco's next film – with her son, Larry, who will direct. Karin Slaughter's Martin Misunderstood is also on Amber's hitlist. "We'll probably do three a year," Elman says. "Then the idea is to go bigger," Maisel adds.
The literary and film industry, however, is suspicious. Amber Entertainment is in negotiations with one leading children's author whose agent, says Elman, is a major stumbling block. When they sought to recruit actors, Maisel found "the English agents were more sceptical than the American agents. At the end of the day, because of my reputation, Lawrence's reputation and [executive producer] Mark Ordesky's reputation, they trusted us, and all of the actors are having a fantastic time. They see this as a new paradigm, too. They see themselves as trailblazers for a whole new kind of entertainment."
Is there suspicion, I ask Dance, because people assume the actors will be slipping in lines like "Every little helps" or quaffing Tesco champagne on camera? "I don't know that there is suspicion, but there is a gnashing of teeth and thinking, 'God, why didn't I think of that?' going on around the business," he says. "Jackie Collins has been hugely prolific, I mean, God almighty, and she has an enormous readership. If this scheme," he says, sounding as though he is picking up the word with tweezers, "allows films to be made from her books and to be available on the supermarket shelf, it is all to the good. We provide entertainment, and they are entertaining, if nothing else."
When not playing Russian fashion moguls, does he shop in Tesco? "Sometimes," says Dance unconvincingly. Will he be buying this DVD? "Well, I hope I have a year's free groceries." He laughs. Have you got a contract with special Tesco deals? "No, that's a joke. Worth a try, though, isn't it? A delivery of organic vegetables would be great, I'd love that."
Dance admires the "simple and brilliant" straight-to-the-supermarket idea, cutting out film distributors, sales agents and cinemas. He is currently struggling to find funds for his own second film. "Now is not the time to go around asking people to lend you a couple of million quid with no guarantee of getting a penny of it back, but that's the way films are made." Is he tempted to knock on the door of Mr Asda or Mr Morrisons? "No, but I think I shall knock on the door of Mr Tesco and ask if he's interested in something else, oh yes, absolutely. It wouldn't surprise me if Waitrose or Asda or Sainsbury's started thinking about Waitrose Pictures or something."
Dance, Steinwedell and the other actors are stoic about their tight schedule. Dance praises the director for running a tight ship. And Caroline Chikezie, a British actor who plays Madison's journalist friend and is best known for her role in Footballers Wives, says that though filming Paris Connections is more "intense" than big Hollywood productions, it feels "like the good old days before the recession". Amber Entertainment and Tesco will not reveal anything about the film's budget, but "I think it's quite decent," Chikezie says. "It's a before-the-recession type vibe. Everything is being done to the highest possible standard – the finest hotels, first-class trains, top designers."
How does she feel about the film going straight to DVD? "There is a stigma. It's like a diss – oh, that's going straight to DVD – but it is only bad when it was intended for the movie theatre, then it doesn't make it. In this case, it is a well thought-out plan, and it makes complete sense to me."
Maisel argues that her deal with Tesco enables film-makers and actors to produce viable – and glamorous – feature films when times are hard. "It's a great idea, and that's why we got such great actors. There's not as many movies being made and they see the quality of this – we're shooting this as if it's a big feature. One of the promises we made to Jackie, we made to our actors, we made to Tesco, is that, to all intents and purposes, it's going to smell, taste and feel like a feature."
What about the jokes that were made when the film was first announced, about whether Paris Connections would be a Value or Finest production? "It's a movie. You can see for yourself. The level of quality we are getting, the technicians we have, all of these people make feature films. So they are basically getting Tesco's Finest for Tesco's brand cost."
The movie flopped big time with abysmal DVD sales and Tesco quickly abandons any future film projects.
Film flop for Tesco
An attempt by Tesco to make a Hollywood blockbuster has flopped.
The chain funded a Jackie Collins adaptation, starring Sting's wife Trudie Styler, in exchange for early DVD distribution rights.
Paris Connections sold 20,000 copies in six weeks, charting at number 35.
A source told The Grocer trade magazine: "They would be disappointed."
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Paris Connections Video Diaries Week 1
Paris Connections Video Diaries Week 2
THE PIGEON
A short film starring Ethan Sawyer and Nicole Steinwedell
Miss Steinwedell hides her birth date quite well and search on the net fails to produce the real age. But there is another way. Girls - just like us men - likes to hanged out with women in similar age bracket. Voila. Most of her close tweet and Facebook female buddies are in late twenties and early thirties so my best guess is Nicole just turned 30 this year.
This is a work of fiction set in a background of history. Public personages both living and dead may appear in the story under their right names. Scenes and dialogue involving them with fictitious characters are of course invented. Any other usage of real people's names is coincidental. Any resemblance of the imaginary characters to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Nicole Steinwedell is a dazzlingly beauty. With Amazonian curves, lustrous blond tress you want to touch, smell and gripped them as you fuck her from behind, Nicole is a sight and a cure for tired eyes and sore dicks. Bedroom eyes enhanced by cobalt blue orbs. Even Michelangelo will cum in wonder at Nicole’s magnificently structured face. When she smiles flashing those prominent pearly whites……..the kind of smile you want to see first thing in the morning when you open your eyes . The kind of smile you’ll be privileged to when you make love to her. Cuddling with her will melt away your problems. The softness of her well-endowed breasts. Feeling the heat coming from between her long legs. Nestling closer to Nicole and whispering in her ear the words she been longing to hear for so long : "I’m ready to be cuckolded"……..Yes. Miss Steinwedell predilection is a well-kept secret. She hungers for cock of ebony kind. Ravished by a black stud. The Floridian biggest turn on though is watching her partner watching her getting fucked senselessly by the black bull. At the moment Nicole is afraid to admit the sexual yearning to her loved one. Don’t worry babe. I’m here for you. Ready to be cuckolded. Just give me a shout-out and I’ll fly to L.A. Hold your hand and gaze into each other eyes while the dark stud works you over. Assuaging your white guilt and heightening your sexuality to a new level at the same time. When he spurts the love juice all over your face and into your open inviting mouth, our soul will forever locked together in love.
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