Maryland Business

By: Liz Farmer

Last year I wrote about Baltimore students who were involved in a national competition for young entrepreneurs as part of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship program.

NFTE was founded in New York City’s South Bronx in 1987 as a dropout prevention program and provides entrepreneurship curriculum to middle schools and high schools in low-income communities. The students learn how to start a business, from writing a business plan to implementation. NFTE’s success caught the eye of documentary filmmaker Mary Mazzio and Mazzio’s documentary on the 2008 competition debuts this week in Baltimore.

“Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon,” premiers on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at The Brown Center at the Maryland Institute College of Art (tickets are free but must be reserved in advance.) The film will also air on Black Entertainment Television (BET) at noon on Sunday, Feb. 7.

The Baltimore students in the film are Jamal Wills and William Mack, now seniors at Patterson High School, who started J&W Sensations, a lotion company, and Anne’ Montague, a recent graduate of Forest Park High School who founded Inamoratos Dance, a nonprofit that offers affordable dance lessons to  people between the ages of 10-21.

Baltimore sent two students (Alayna Albertie and Keenen Geter) last year to the national competition and four out of the 28 national finalists were from Maryland. The first, second and third place winners were from California, Illinois and Massachusetts, respectively.

By: Liz Farmer

Maryland jockey Grant Whitacre will be portraying Paul Feliciano in the movie “Secretariat,” which is slated to be released in the fall. Feliciano rode the 1973 Triple Crown winner in his first two career starts as an apprentice, before the more experienced Ron Turcotte took over.

Secretariat is considered by many to be the best race horse of all time. Mayhem Pictures, with the backing of Walt Disney Pictures, is producing the movie. The companies have collaborated before on sports pics like “Miracle” and “The Rookie.”

(Side note: I have yet to see a sports movie where I don’t get a little weepy — especially a Disney one. When I saw “Miracle” in the theater I was frantically dabbing at my eyes during that final big scene and praying nobody noticed. Those folks at Disney definitely have my number. So, I will be seeing Secretariat when it’s released, it will get a little dusty in the theater and this time I’m bringing Kleenex.)

Whitacre got the job after responding to a casting call in Timonium last year. He got to rub shoulders with some pretty impressive Hollywood company during last fall’s shoot — Diane Lane is playing the owner Penny Chenery (the housewife-turned-champion-breeder), and John Malkovich is cast as the trainer Lucien Laurin.

As for Whitacre in real life, the 24-year-old had a breakout year in 2009. After battling injuries for the first three years of his career, the former Atholton High School baseball player established himself as a reliable rider, ranking seventh in the overall standings last year at Pimlico and Laurel Park. In September, he had the signature win of his career with a victory aboard Sumacha’hot in the Jim McKay Maryland Million Classic.

This weekend, Whitacre was diagnosed with a small hairline fracture in his lower back after being tossed from his mount, Blue Wren, in Saturday’s race at Laurel. He is expected to miss two to six weeks.

Another Maryland-based rider, Tom Foley, will play exercise rider Jim Gaffney in the movie.

By: Liz Farmer

Maybe a bunch of college students getting together to watch porn is not the craziest thing you ever heard of. But how about when a university hosts the event?

Saturday Hoff Theater at University of Maryland will air a midnight showing of “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge.” School officials have said the showing offers students an alternative to late night drinking.

Here’s a description of the film from Hoff’s Web site: “Pirate hunter Captain Edward Reynolds and his blond first mate, Jules Steel, return where they are recruited by a shady governor general to find a darkly sinister Chinese empress pirate, named Xifing, and her group of Arab cutthroats, whom are trying to resurrect the late Victor Stagnetti, the world’s most feared pirate, from the grave to bring on world domination. Planned Parenthood will provide a brief introduction.”

In a radio interview this morning, Lisa Cunningham, program coordinator for Hoff, defending the theater’s choice to air the film saying it was the student committee’s unanimous choice to show the XXX-rated film. She also assured that taxpayer dollars, contrary to some protester’s beliefs, were not paying for the film. Instead, the university gets the films for free and the ticket sales cover wages and the cost of keeping the building open.

What are your thought on the choice? Is this just allowing free speech and freedom of expression at a public university? Or has the theater crossed a line?

By: jackie.sauter

By: jackie.sauter

Most people know Fells Point’s Recreation Pier as the filming location for the NBC series “Homicide: Life on the Street,” which ran from 1993 to 1999.

But in 2006, the historic structure was also part of the set for “Step Up,” a fantastically teenaged guilty pleasure of a movie about competitive dance crews, and again for “Step Up 2: The Streets.”

Both were set in Baltimore, and both, curiously, involve scenes in which street dancers vandalize the Maryland School of the Arts.While reporting on today’s story about the Recreation Pier, Daily Record photographer Rich Dennison and I got a brief tour of the building and saw the leftovers of the filming sets for the Step Up films.

In the tradition of On the Record blog posts about forgotten movie sets, here’s a slideshow of interior shots of the Recreation Pier, standing in as the Maryland School of the Arts.

ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer

By: jackie.sauter

A funny thing happened on the way to work this morning. Walking down Saratoga Street a few blocks from North Charles, a woman with immaculate makeup wearing a pillbox hat and a very 1950s-looking yellow-and-black checked dress walked by me.

“Odd,” I thought. Then I saw a man in a dress shirt and bowler hat and beyond him, sidewalk tables filled with a spread of breakfast fruit and pastries and several people lined up at a trailer waiting for hot food. The movie trailers parked farther down the street confirmed my suspicions.

Resisting my urge to follow in my sister’s footsteps and pretend like I was a movie extra to score some free grub (she went to school in Los Angeles and would occasionally stumble upon location shoots), I continued to the office to put in a call to the Maryland Department of Business and Development to confirm that it was indeed the Renee Zellweger movie, “My One and Only,” shooting downtown today.

Wanting to know more, we sent down our multimedia reporter, Richard Simon, to harass as many crew members and extras who would speak to him. Here’s what he found:

RICHARD:

I walked onto the “set”, er, sidewalk with my snazzy video camera. There I was, snapping away, when one of the producers on the set told me to get out.

I obliged, and observed from afar. This was only my second time even close to a movie set. The first time was when the cast of Liberty Heights set up shop outside of my middle school (tells you how old I am).

There were a number of community members who served as extras, as they waved to people they knew on the street.

And yes…there was free food.

LIZ FARMER, Business Writer

Photo above by Max Franz, who also got ejected from the area - but not before snapping Ms. Zellweger.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/dqM_fEi6b7c" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

By: jackie.sauter

Renee Zellweger will star as a glamorous divorcee in search of a wealthy husband in “My One and Only,” which starts shooting next month - in Maryland. The Baltimore area, to be exact.

Producer Aaron Ryder credited a state film-production incentive program for luring the movie to the Old Line State (Who knew? They work!).

The period romantic comedy will be set in the 1950s and is loosely based on the childhood memories of actor George Hamilton. They’ll film here for eight weeks.

JACKIE SAUTER, Web Editor