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Appearances from 2012 > Playing Politics With Women’s Health: The 2012 Election And Why It Matters

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Candids from 2012 > 26.01.12 – Walking Ramona to school

Rudin selected the team behind his Oscar-nominated film “The Hours,” writer David Hare and director Stephen Daldry, for the project back in 2002. Daldry stepped off a few years later, with Robert Zemeckis replacing him as director, but the film never came to pass. Instead, the adaptation found new life moving ahead as an HBO series, with writer-director Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg“) at the helm, and a cast full of A-listers and Oscar-winners forming. Not only that, Frazen has co-written the pilot with Baumbach, in addition to co-writing every single episode of the first season and is an executive producer of the series.

Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest were the first on board, as Alfred and Enid Lambert, the parents of a dysfunctional Midwestern family, while Ewan McGregor signed on not long after to play their middle son Chip, a disgraced socialist professor. And now a few more big names look to be coming aboard, as Baz Bamgiboye reports that Maggie Gyllenhaal and Rhys Ifans are both in early talks to join the project.  Gyllenaal, would play Denise, the Lamberts’ youngest daughter, a bisexual Philadelphia chef, while Ifans would play, in what’s described as a cameo, a Lithuanian gangster who draws McGregor’s character into his world.

Update: Deadline reports that Greta Gerwig and Bruce Norris are also coming on board. Gerwig will play Chip’s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend and a film producer, while Norris will play the older brother Gary, a successful yet depressed banker with a drinking problem.

While it’s been known for a while that Baumbach would be writing and directing the pilot for the network, it’s been unclear what the game plan beyond that would be. A five-part mini-series like “Mildred Pierce?” Or something more open-ended, like “The Sopranos?” For the first time, it’s starting to crystallize. According to Bamigboye, should the two-hour pilot impress HBO executives (something that seems all but a certainty, given the pedigree involved), the intention is for there to be four seasons of ten episodes each, a far longer run than we’d realistically guessed.

And it does give us a little pause. Can a forty-hour take on a 550 page book feel anything but languid and padded-out? We’re assuming the intention is to depart from the source material, but it does feel like an awful lot of time. Then again, with a cast like this, it could be the equivalent of twenty new Noah Baumbach movies over four years, and we’re not sure we’d complain too much about that prospect.

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Movie Productions > 2011 – Hysteria > Posters
Movie Productions > 2011 – Hysteria > Promotional Stills

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Candids from 2011 > 21.12.11 – Running Errands
Candids from 2012 > 01.01.12 – Out In Malibu

Updates coming shortly.

Is that hard to understand?? Please stop spamming my mailbox with fan letters or pathetic total-waste-of-time hate letters.

My mother was very politically active and taught both my brother and me that it is everyone’s responsibility as a citizen and as a person in the world to fight for what you believe in. And what I believe very strongly is that every woman has the right to decide what she can do with her body.

That seems like a no-brainer to me, but it’s not to some politicians; they’re working to restrict women’s access to reproductive health services—things like cancer screenings, birth control and abortion care. With jobs bills waiting on legislative calendars, the unemployment rate at a crisis level and many Americans losing their homes, I find it incredibly frustrating that we’re being forced to spend so much time and energy (and, yes, money) defending something as basic as self-determination.

The assaults on women’s health care have been fast and furious. Over 80 abortion restrictions were enacted in 2011—more than double the previous record, in 2005. But it’s not just abortion that’s under fire. Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry dramatically cut funding that would have provided many low-income women with cervical cancer screenings, birth control and STD prevention and treatment. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey slashed $7.5 million from his state’s budget meant for family planning centers that provide birth control and Pap tests. And there are dozens more examples all over the country. (You can visit Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s womenarewatching.org to see where some 2012 candidates stand on these issues.)

Many of these attacks are designed to shut down one provider: Planned Parenthood, the only health care provider to have been targeted by name in recent federal legislation. Restricting access to the services Planned Parenthood provides would affect millions of women—one in five American women turns to a Planned Parenthood health center at some point in her life. And more than 90 percent of these centers’ services are in preventive care; 3 percent are in abortion care.

I find these restrictions dismaying because they disproportionately target women with lower incomes. Wealthy women will always be able to access the health care they need. Planned Parenthood is there for every woman. This is an organization that works in communities to provide high-quality care like cervical cancer screenings, breast exams, HIV tests and birth control—often to women who would otherwise go without. It is the place you call if you are 16 and don’t know whom to ask about birth control. It’s the website that has answers in the middle of the night. It’s the health care resource that offers compassion and respect to women at times when they are incredibly vulnerable and afraid.

I’ve been a Planned Parenthood supporter my whole life—since my mom took me to a rally when I was in sixth grade. It’s chilling to think of this resource being taken away. I have a five-year-old daughter, and I’m pregnant with my second child. I know when my children are older, I will be taking them to events like the one I went to with my mom. I hope we’ll be celebrating our freedoms and rights, not fighting for them once again as we are now.

Oscar-nominated Maggie Gyllenhaal stars in next month’s Won’t Back Down.