Animated, Adventure, Fantasy
Synopsis
No adults believe three youths' (Mitchel Musso, Spencer Locke, Sam Lerner) assertion that a neighboring residence is a living creature that means them harm.
Cast: Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mitchel Musso, Spencer Locke, Sam Lerner, Jon Heder, Kevin James, Jason Lee, Catherine O'Hara, Kathleen Turner, Fred Willard, Matthew Fahey, Nick Cannon
Producer(s): Imagemovers
Crew: Director - Gil Kenan, Writer - Ron Schrab, Writer - Dan Harmon, Writer - Pamela Pettler, Executive Producer - Robert Zemeckis, Executive Producer - Steven Spielberg, Executive Producer - Jason Clark, Producer - Jack Rapke, Producer - Steve Starkey, Cinematographer - Xavier Grobet, Editor - Adam Scott, Cinematographer - Paul Babin, Casting - Scot Boland, Casting - Victoria Burrows, Production Design - Ed Verreaux, Art Direction - Norman Newberry, Art Direction - Greg Papalia, Set Decoration - Kate Sullivan, Costume Designer - Ruth Myers
Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment
Release Date: 07/21/2006
Running Time: 91 minutes
OFFICIAL SITE
| PG | Parental Guidance Suggested |
Production Notes:
- Notes provided by Sony Pictures Entertainment. -
In Columbia Pictures' comedy thrill-ride Monster House, three kids (newcomers Mitchel Musso, Sam Lerner and Spencer Locke) cross over to the other side of the street to unlock a mystery and experience the greatest adventure of their lives.
DJ (Musso), the kid across the street, has the plan. Jenny (Locke), the newcomer, has the brains. And Chowder (Lerner), DJ's best friend, doesn't have a clue.
Monster House is an utterly unique and cleverly conceived animated feature from visionary executive producers Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg that brings together a stellar cast of actors including Steve Buscemi (Monsters, Inc.), Nick Cannon (Drumline), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary), Kevin James (The King of Queens), Jason Lee (The Incredibles), Catherine O'Hara (The Nightmare Before Christmas), Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite), Kathleen Turner (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and Fred Willard (Waiting for Guffman). The film is directed by Gil Kenan, produced by Steve Starkey and Jack Rapke and executive produced by Jason Clark. The screenplay is by Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab and Pamela Pettler, from a story by Harmon & Schrab.
Synopsis
Twelve-year-old DJ Walters, who is caught in that awkward moment between childhood and the onset of puberty, has too much time on his hands and has taken it into his head that there's something weird about old man Nebbercracker's house across the street. Things keep disappearing into the dilapidated structure: basketballs, tricycles, toys and pets. Come to think of it, whatever happened to Mrs. Nebbercracker?
It's the day before Halloween and DJ and his candy-friendly pal Chowder have a run-in with Mr. Nebbercracker after their basketball wanders onto his lawn and is mysteriously swept into the house. When the house tries to swallow their new friend Jenny and no one believes the frightened trio's claims that the house is up to no good, it's up to them to investigate.
They turn for advice to the only person on the planet who might even remotely understand what's going on, the wise one they call Skull, a 20-something slacker pizza chef and master of the arcade machine who once played a video game for four days straight on one single quarter, a gallon of chocolate milk and an adult diaper. "I have heard tell of man-made structures becoming possessed by a human soul," Skull tells them.
You mean the house is alive? Yikes!
Skull tells them the only way to stop the house from gulping down everything in sight is by striking at its heart, which the kids figure out must be the perpetually-fueled furnace in the basement. They come up with what seems to be a foolproof plan - a vacuum cleaner disguised as a human dummy filled with cold medicine. The kids offer up their bait to the house, figuring that once it's asleep, they can sneak in and put out the furnace with their squirt guns.
Their little plan goes awry, though, and when the house starts chasing them down the street - that's right, chasing them down the street! - they must join forces to once again make the neighborhood safe for trick or treaters.
Columbia Pictures Presents in association with Relativity Media An ImageMovers/Amblin Production Monster House starring Steve Buscemi, Nick Cannon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, John Heder, Kevin James, Jason Lee, Catherine O'Hara, Kathleen Turner and Fred Willard. The film is directed by Gil Kenan. The screenplay is by Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab and Pamela Pettler, from a story by Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab. The producers are Steve Starkey and Jack Rapke, The executive producers are Robert Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg and Jason Clark. The director of photography is Xavier Perez Grobet. The production designer is Ed Verreaux. The film is edited by Adam P. Scott and Fabienne Rawley. Imagery and Animation is by Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. The visual effects supervisor is Jay Redd. The costume design is by Ruth Myers. The music is by Douglas Pipes.
Monster House has been rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for Scary Images and Sequences, Thematic Elements, Some Crude Humor and Brief Language.
Monster House careens into theaters nationwide on July 21, 2006.
The Monster House Story
Monster House brings together two seminal Oscar®-winning filmmakers - Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg - who are joining forces with a talented newcomer, filmmaker Gil Kenan, and are pioneering another breakthrough in the art of moviemaking: The cutting-edge technology known as motion-capture animation. With the help of a cleverly funny and wonderfully scary script by Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab and Pamela Pettler, from a story by Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab, they have applied this magical new development to two beloved genres
- comedy family film and scary movie - seamlessly combining them to entertain and jolt the imagination of their worldwide audience of admirers.
Motion pictures have a long, well-regarded tradition of highlighting scary/haunted houses - from the Gothic mansion in Psycho to Boo Radley's eerie shack in To Kill a Mockingbird to the out-of-place suburban residence that housed Edward Scissorhands - and exploring kids' fascination with these forbidding structures and their strange inhabitants. Given the genre's enduring appeal, it's no surprise that executives at Robert Zemeckis' production company ImageMovers were immediately intrigued when writers Dan Harmon & Rob Schrab pitched their idea about a house that is alive.
"From the moment it went into development at ImageMovers," says Zemeckis. "I thought it was an extremely clever and totally cool idea."
Adds producer Steve Starkey: "This was something unique, family-friendly with a fresh, contemporary attitude. Our goal was not only to make a scary story, but one with a lot of humorous hip sensibility that would appeal to old and young audiences alike."
However, the Monster House script presented the filmmakers with one seemingly insurmountable technical problem: At one climatic moment, the haunted house is supposed to break free of its foundations and roam the streets, terrorizing everyone in the neighborhood. "Since it was originally conceived of as a conventional live-action film," says Starkey, "the dilemma was always, `How do you blend a conventional film with a house that comes to life?'"
"We struggled with that problem for a long time," adds producer Jack Rapke. "We were asking ourselves, `What will that world look like? Will it just end up looking goofy?'"
The problem was solved when Zemeckis discovered the groundbreaking motion- capture process, which was then honed and perfected by Sony Pictures Imageworks and applied to ImageMovers' worldwide hit The Polar Express (which Zemeckis directed). "Motion-capture seemed to be the perfect way to best tell the Monster House story," explains Zemeckis. "It's the perfect blend of live-action cinema and computer-generated imagery. This way you have control over the images and, at the same time, get to work with skilled professional performers - which allows for the kinds of happy accidents you only get when you're working with live actors."
From the start, Monster House was conceived to be more stylized than The Polar Express. "While Polar Express was designed to be more photo-realistic, Monster House was different," explains executive producer Jason Clark. "We felt comfortable taking liberties with the design of the characters in Monster House and using animation to enhance the performances. We hired a lot of the Polar Express crew, who not only taught us what worked, but also what we could improve on. The technology was constantly evolving. In the process, we've devised a kind of `bleeding edge' technology of filmmaking -- which is like the cutting edge, but a little more out there."
Finding the right director for the project presented ImageMovers with another challenge - until they met a young graduate student named Gil Kenan whose college senior year film, The Lark, won the UCLA Spotlight Awards in 2002. "The Lark was interesting because it was so different," says Rapke. "Gil told his story utilizing techniques that really intrigued us."
"As soon as I saw Gil's reel, I had a sense he was the perfect choice for this movie, even though he'd never made a full length feature before," says Zemeckis. "When we discussed the project, he had such a clear and innovative vision, that I saw immediately my instincts were correct. He got that it should be funny and scary and how the balance of the two would make the story truly special."
"From the moment I saw his short film, The Lark, I recognized that Gil was a special talent," says executive producer Steven Spielberg. "He proved it every step of the way on Monster House, from his creativity in regards to the performance driven animation to his resourceful work with the actors. Gil allowed performances to sound almost improvisational when they were in fact carefully scripted."
Coincidentally, The Lark featured a house infested tears and anger. "I became infatuated a few years back with the idea of creating an emotional relationship between a person and an environment," explains Gil Kenan, "with making that relationship visual and dramatic, defining a personality and anthropomorphizing it. So when Monster House came my way, it was almost comically situated right in the bull's-eye of how I wanted to tell a story - how humans and their homes and environments can interact. In the end, the house has more than just a vengeful spirit, it has a soul."
The Wish List
"Gil made a wish list of all the actors he wanted in Monster House," recalls Rapke. "We went to Sony with it and to our amazement and surprise, he got a yes from everybody he wanted. He got Maggie Gyllenhaal to play the babysitter, Zee. He got Jason Lee to play Bones, Jon Heder to play Skull, Catherine O'Hara and Fred Willard to play DJ's parents. He got Kevin James as Officer Landers and Nick Cannon as Officer Lister. He even got Steve Buscemi to play Nebbercracker. It was amazing, and I assured Gil it would never happen in his life again. And to top it off, he got Kathleen Turner to play Constance."
With one of the greatest voices in the entertainment business, Kathleen Turner has always enjoyed enormous success with her vocal cords. "I got involved in Monster House through Bob Zemeckis," Kathleen Turner says. "He had cast me as the voice of Jessica in Roger Rabbit, so he called up and said, `Would you be interested in a new technique?' because he knows that I'm always interested in any kind of new development that comes along. But the real hook was when he said, `Well, you played the sexiest animated character in Roger Rabbit, now you can play the ugliest.' And I immediately said, `Oh, okay.'"
Kenan admits that it was more than good luck that got him such a stellar cast. "I'm sure part of the casting is a testament to the respect my producers command in this industry," he says. "From the first time I read the script, I had a very clear sense of what the characters should look like. I felt like these actors were calling out and embodying the characters in my head as I read. "
"As with any project, it's all about what's on the page," says Starkey. "When we sent the script to actors, they were immediately taken with its originality, its humor and cleverness. Everyone wanted to be part of what they knew would be a special experience. We'd made them an offer they just couldn't refuse."
"I got a call saying that they were interested in having me," Steve Buscemi remembers, "and they showed me Gil's short film, which was different from other animated films I'd seen. It was a little bit dark. I liked his sensibility and his sense of humor, and I liked the script for Monster House, too."
To cast the three child actors featured in Monster House, a massive search was conducted throughout the United States and Canada. "We contacted agents, film commissions, acting schools and managers," says casting director Victoria Burrows. "We saw children who had lots of professional experience and some who had none. Their ages ranged from ten to 20 years old. But in the end, we cast kids who were the ages specified in the original script."
"It was a very grueling process," Kenan confesses. "I probably saw every kid in America at least once, and almost half that number came in and read." The three young actors he chose - Sam Lerner (Chowder), Mitchel Musso (DJ) and Spencer Locke (Jenny]) immediately became fast friends and their youthful chemistry proved to be an invaluable asset to the production.
"Black-Box Theater"
After five days of rehearsal, blocking and line readings, principal photography commenced on Monster House. The 20' x 20' "volume" - the area in which the motion-capture equipment was set up and in which the actors performed - was constructed on Stage 6 at Culver Studios. For the most part, the film was shot in sequence over a relatively short production schedule. "A 42-day shoot is pretty quick," says executive producer Clark, "especially compared to most live-action shoots, which often go more than a hundred days. And we had kids who had shortened working hours, so our days were very short."
As refined for Monster House, Imageworks motion-capture process provided the filmmakers a creative instrument with which they could record the live-action performances in richly detailed data upon which the animation is then based.
The preparation for shooting a film in motion-capture was a lengthy daily ritual for the actors. At dawn every day, they had to don a special suit and shoes. In the makeup room, their hair was pulled back, a plastic cap was glued to their heads and plastic reflective dots were glued to their faces.
"In makeup, Sam Lerner, who plays Chowder, and Mitchel Musso, who plays DJ, were just bouncing everywhere," recalls Jon Heder. "They'd be singing into the microphones. I think they were just really excited to be part of such a big production."
Since all of the acting took place inside the "volume," careful consideration was given to the props that would eventually appear on screen. "We had to design the sets and props in software programs like Maya and Rhino with the design team, as if they were really going to be built on a stage," explains production designer Ed Verreaux. "We did construction drawings to build the wire-frame pieces that the actors could actually interact with. For instance, when the actors are sitting at a table, they need something to be leaning their elbows on and something to sit on - only it couldn't be solid. A real table would prevent the digital cameras from seeing all the points of reference on the actors' bodies. So it all had to be wire-framed. What they were doing essentially was living in a wire frame world, and then all that was transposed into computer geometry, which then became solid in the computer during postproduction."
For the actors, working in the "volume" was more like acting on stage than performing in front of a movie camera. As Starkey points out, "You didn't have the presence of a camera, or lights, or marks to hit. Your rhythm wasn't broken when it came time to change the film in the camera. Once the actors hit the floor in motion-capture, they got to do their scenes without worrying about any of the numerous technicalities that are usually a part of the filmmaking process. I think that's why they really enjoyed it."
In addition, there was another aspect to working in this format that appealed to the actors. "To do it, you really had to use your imagination full time," says Buscemi.
According to Clark, "Shooting an entire movie in one 20' x 20' square was challenging for all of us. But I can only image what it must have been for a director to imagine sets he has never seen fully rendered and explain the scene to his actors. But Gil was very quick to adapt. He had a way of letting the fantasy take over and was able to put them at ease immediately. At one point, our three heroes are exploring Nebbercracker's basement and they were having some difficulty getting into the adventure and spookiness of it since they were walking around the well-lit stage, trying to act like they're exploring a spooky basement. So Gil had us dim the lights and suddenly, the stage got spooky and the kids totally got into the adventure."
As it turned out, that very element of imagination - on the part of the actors and the animators -- is what made the experience so unique and creative. "The really beautiful hybrid that we're creating with 'mo-cap' and animation was based on actors," says visual effects supervisor Jay Redd. "All of it fused together to create something special that audiences have never seen before."
Stretching Animation
The endgame for production on Monster House was a complex, layered job involving the talent and teamwork at Imageworks, an award-winning digital production company. "Imageworks took the creative elements the director put together and amalgamated the art and performances into fully lit and precisely rendered images," explains executive producer Clark.
Imageworks animation supervisor Troy Saliba and lead character animator T. Dan Hofstedt worked closely with director Kenan and visual effects supervisor Redd on the final animation for the film. "We knew we were going to do motion- capture, but we wanted to do something different," says Redd. "We knew our world was going to be more - to use an overused term - stylized. We have human beings, but we also have a house that walks around the neighborhood. It was my job to figure out how to do all of that in terms of dramatic visual effects and to assemble a team of experts to create everything from the models, textures, and motion-capture to the animation, lighting and composites."
"First we did drawings of all the characters," says Hofstedt. "We took the character designs that Chris Appelhans had done, and we did drawings to illustrate the physical and emotional range they needed to go through in the story. We weren't doing one-for-one actor-to-animated-character look-alikes. We had to interpret things to get the expressions to work, so we took emotional moments that we either made up or that came from the actors. We picked a frame where the actor was either angry, happy or scared. Then we tried to manually key-frame that expression. From there, we took our digital animation rigs and worked with the riggers and the CG modelers until they duplicated that emotional range."
"The 'mo-cap' performance lent itself well to what we were doing," adds Saliba, "but we were able to push it a bit farther. The first challenge was making sure the rigs we were using - that is, the actual CG puppets - could perform the way we needed them to. They had to work with 'mo-cap,' but also be pushed a little bit more graphically."
"That was the foundation of taking it a step beyond live-action - adding the caricaturing and animation sensibilities," according to Hofstedt.
"Monster House was conceived using motion-capture technology, because that enabled us to tell a story that lives in a parallel universe," says executive producer Clark. "The audience will recognize it as consistent with traditional suburban streets in an ordinary neighborhood, but will hopefully find it just unreal enough to buy the third act - when the house crashes through the neighborhood chasing the kids."
The Sound and the Fury
From the very beginning, one of the central goals of the movie was to anthropomorphize the house, to give it expression and breathe life into the inanimate bricks and mortar structure. The cutting-edge technology used in Monster House enabled the filmmakers to realize this amazing central character. Designing the look of the house was a painstaking process. "It was hard to come up with a design for the house that was creepy and yet not so scary that the audience wouldn't accept that it could go unnoticed in the neighborhood," explains layout/concept artist Chris Appelhans. "It had to start out as just another old house that, when the light shifts a little, suddenly seems monstrous and foreboding."
"One of the benefits of the animation in Monster House is that you can construct the house so it looks like it has two eyes and a mouth," says producer Starkey. "They were actually able to mimic human expression."
And that task fell to Kathleen Turner. "The way an actor moves and how they carry themselves - all the invisible signals - whether they're tentative or angry, all that reads in the body," says Turner. "Having a camera translate that into a computer is an effective way of preserving that performance."
In addition to capturing her character's physical performance, Turner was instrumental in creating the furious sounds made by the house. Turner and director Kenan met at New York's famed Brill Building to record her vocalizations as well as her non-verbal performance as the monstrous house. A tape of that vocal performance was sent to Skywalker Sound, which is part of George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in Northern California, and married to the natural sounds of wood bending and house shifting. The film's sound team had located a rickety old wooden barn in the hills of nearby Marin country and they attached amplifiers to its inner walls. In this way they were able to capture the house's natural moans and groans and help shape them into sound for the Monster House that is appropriately ominous and surprisingly human.
Final Words
Ultimately, all the hard work that went into making Monster House paid off for the dedicated cast and crew. "I think Monster House will be a powerful cinematic experience," promises producer Rapke. "It's a fun roller-coaster ride, visually different from anything ever seen on screen. We've used this medium to push it into an area where it's never been used before - the making of a scary movie for kids."
"Kids will go up and down the roller coaster and scream along the way," producer Starkey predicts. "But, in the end, they'll feel good. I'm thrilled by what Monster House has taught us about the flexibility of motion-capture. Monster House is going to wake people up to the realization that there are all kinds of movies that can be made this way."
"Motion-capture is not going to replace animation," says Zemeckis. "But one of the difficulties with traditional two-dimensional animation has always been in animating human characters, back to the early days of Disney. But I like to think that motion-capture had created an avenue to make movies that can't be made in live-action and shouldn't be made as animated cartoons. Now we have a place for stories that would not be able to realize their full potential in either of the other two art forms. Motion-capture fills a void in the medium of cinematic storytelling. It's a boundless technology. We're really only just scratching the surface."
"Monster House has a special place in my heart," says writer Rob Schrab. "It was the beginning of my screenwriting career with Dan. We just wanted to make a movie we would go see - a kid's movie that doesn't talk down to kids and isn't afraid to thrill them either. My dream is that Monster House will open the door to more creature features made especially with kids in mind."
ABOUT SONY PICTURES IMAGEWORKS INC.
Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. is an Academy Award(C)-winning digital production company dedicated to the art and artistry of visual effects. Key members of the Imageworks Monster House visual effect team include visual effects supervisor Jay Redd, visual effects producer Crys Forsyth-Smith, animation supervisor Troy Saliba, and lead character animator T. Dan Hofstedt.
Imageworks has been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with nominations for its work on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Spider-Man®, Hollow Man, Stuart Little and Starship Troopers, and was awarded Oscars(C) for Spider-Man® 2 and the CG animated short film The ChubbChubbs! Imageworks continues to raise the standards in the visual effects and character animation businesses, becoming a major force in the industry by providing leading-edge technologies to its world-class artists.
About the Cast
STEVE BUSCEMI (Nebbercracker)
By consistently portraying some of the most unique and unforgettable film characters in recent memory, Steve Buscemi has built a singular career in American movies.
In 2002, he won the Independent Spirit Award, The New York Film Critics Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role in Ghost World. He was also nominated for an Emmy and a DGA Award for directing the "Pine Barrens" episode of The Sopranos. He has since directed four more episodes, and became a series acting regular in the fifth season of the show, receiving an Emmy nomination for his role.
He will next be seen in the Coen Brothers' portion of Paris Je T'aime, Tom Di Cillo's Delirious, and heard as the voice of Templeton the Rat in Charlotte's Web. He will next begin production as the lead in We're the Millers.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Buscemi began to show an interest in drama while in his last year of high school. Soon after, he moved to Manhattan to study acting with John Strasberg. There he and a fellow actor/writer Mark Boone Junior began writing and performing their own theater pieces in performance spaces and downtown venues, which led to his being cast in his first lead role in Bill Sherwood's Parting Glances as a musician with AIDS.
Since then, he has become the actor of choice for many of the best directors in the motion pictures. His resume includes Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train for which he received an IFP Spirit Award Nomination, Alexandre Rockwell's 1992 Sundance Film Festival Jury Award-winner In the Soup, Martin Scorsese's New York Stories, the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing, Romance and Cigarettes, Barton Fink, the Academy Award®-winning Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Big Fish, Stanley Tucci's The Imposters, the Jerry Bruckheimer productions Con Air, Michael Bay's The Island and Armageddon, Tom Di Cillo's Sundance Film Festival Award-winning Living in Oblivion, Twenty Bucks, John Carpenter's Escape From L.A., Desperado, Domestic Disturbance, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Alexandre Rockwell's Somebody to Love, an IFP Spirit Award-winning performance as Mr. Pink in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs,
Robert Altman's Kansas City, Deeds, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, The Grey Zone, 13 Moons, Double Whammy, the HBO telefilm The Laramie Project, and numerous cameo appearances in films such as Art School Confidential, Rising Sun, The Hudsucker Proxy, Big Daddy and The Wedding Singer. He has also provided the voices for characters in the animated features Monsters, Inc., and Final Fantasy.
In addition to his talents as an actor, Buscemi has proven to be a respected writer and a director as well. His first project was a short film What Happened to Pete, which was featured at several film festivals including Rotterdam and LoCarno and aired on the Bravo Network.
He marked his full-length feature film directorial debut with Trees Lounge, which he also wrote and starred in. Buscemi's second feature film as a director, Animal Factory, was based on a book by Edward Bunker. He most recently directed Lonesome Jim starring Liv Tyler and Casey Affleck, and is currently directing the remake of Director Theo Van Gogh's Interview in which he also stars alongside Sienna Miller.
NICK CANNON (Lister)
From a distance, Nick Cannon's trajectory from child actor to writer/ creator of his own TV show - and most recently CEO of his own record label - might appear to mirror the "everything now" blueprint other teen phenomenon's have followed. But for the 25-year- old San Diego native, who burnishes a wit and wisdom equal to the hip-hop bravado that led him to forge his new label, Can I Ball Records, an engaging poise lies behind each of his recent power moves.
Already recognized as an `industry chameleon,' Cannon has kept the slashes between monikers, but also strategically inhabits a disciplined business model that belies his age -- a practice he slyly refers to as the `difference' between being a mogul-in-the-making and a wannabe on the make. And he'd be the first to admit he's seen one too many of the latter himself. Nick's influences include the Jay-Zs and Russell Simmons' of the world so much, because they knew a very important part of their success, however spontaneous, was using every resource available to them as their stature grew. When someone asks him what business role models he looks up to, he always mentions groundbreakers like Bill Cosby and Quincy Jones, who made a true mark in the culture and were able to attack every project from a foundation of knowledge.
A quick checklist of recent projects finds the tireless Cannon hitting his goals on all cylinders. Creator, director, host and the creative force behind the #1 rated show in cable television, the sketch-inspired MTV's "Nick Cannon Presents Wild' n Out," which was recently renewed for its third season and is now launching in the UK and Canada. He's also starring in the soon-to-be-released movies, the Emilio Estevez directed RFK assassination pic Bobby and the gritty indie release Weapons, as well as writing his own soon-to-be-produced boxing film. Adding to his growing empire, Nick is the purveyor of his own multi-million dollar clothing line, PNB Nation. With Quincy Jones, he's producing "The Giggle Club," a Nickelodeon reality show about talented young entertainers. And he recently signed a much-heralded deal with Motown Records to launch Can I Ball Records, aligning with storied executive and president of Motown, Sylvia Rhone, to deliver an arsenal of new artists, as well as his own albums.
Cannon is inaugurating the much anticipated imprint with his own solo release, (his second album to date), "Stages," a title chosen to reflect the multi-layered brush strokes the artist/executive applies to album and career. Working closely with Kanye West, who produced the up-tempo track, "My Wife," has influenced Cannon to take on a new philosophy towards producing the album: An understanding that an album is a great vehicle for you to reach out to your audience and give them an opportunity to get to know you. Cannon wanted to provide a glimpse of every stage of his life, thus treating his connection to his audience with the utmost integrity throughout the
