LEGENDARY TWICKENHAM STUDIOS TO SHUT DOWN

Britain’s 100-year-old Twickenham Studios, the home of such classics as the Beatles’ Help and A Hard Day’s Night, the Michael Caine movies Alfie and The Italian Job, John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner and, more recently, War Horse and My Week with Marilyn, is being forced to shut down. Faced with continuing losses, the studio said that it plans to wind down production over the next months, then sell the studio before June. The studio lost about $600,000 during its fiscal year ended March 2011. “I think it is a real shame that Twickenham’s closing,” key grip Rupert Lloyd Parry told the BBC. “It’s one of our older studios. It’s nice when you work where you feel like there’s a real sort of tradition of the British film industry. … The film industry is buoyant at the moment, there is work coming in. There doesn’t seem like there is any reason for it to shut.”