Names and faces

Director Tate Taylor says he wants to make his native Mississippi a place where people can build careers with steady work in the movie business. He filmed The Help in the state in 2010 and announced last week that he will make a feature film about the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, with the intention of shooting “every frame” in Mississippi. Work is set for November and December in and around the Mississippi River town of Natchez and for January and February in and around the capital city, Jackson. Taylor said studios will shoot movies where it makes the most economic sense and he believes that Mississippi’s revamped film incentives help make the state more attractive. Lawmakers updated the incentives earlier this year, with rebates of as much as $10 million per project for nationally distributed feature films, documentaries and TV shows. Taylor said when A Time to Kill was filmed in Mississippi in the mid-1990s, he worked as a production assistant, which he called “the lowest job on the totem pole.” After that, he moved to Los Angeles. “And, luckily, it kind of worked out for me,” he said.

Former Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum was in a remote Japanese fishing village Monday to protest against its annual dolphin hunt. Sorum, who now leads his own band, is the latest celebrity to join the campaign to stop the dolphin kill in Taiji, a fishing village in central Japan featured in the Academy Award-winning 2009 film The Cove. The movie depicts the herding of dolphins into a cove, where they are speared by fishermen for their meat.The fishermen say the hunt is part of their village’s tradition. The film features Ric O’Barry, who trained dolphins for the 1960s Flipper TV series and is now a dolphin advocate. Sorum arrived in Taiji on Saturday, the day the annual dolphin hunt begins, with O’Barry and dozens of Japanese and Western conservationists. “Like a bad nightmare, I’m watching it almost like a twilight zone, surreal, looking into my eyes in complete disbelief - what’s going on in front of me,” Sorum said, speaking by phone from Taiji after watching the hunt. Sorum, who has also played with Velvet Revolver, said he hoped to organize a rock concert in Tokyo around the theme of “celebrating the dolphin.”