Innholdsfortegnelse for 12/9/2016 i The Hollywood Reporter

Rogue One Mints Millions for Gilroy Rogue One may be about a group of rebels absconding with the Death Star plans, but they aren’t the only ones making out like bandits. Tony Gilroy, brought in to rewrite and help oversee reshoots for the Gareth Edwards-directed Star Wars film, out Dec. 16, will pocket north of $5 million, say sources. The writer of Bourne movies and director of Michael Clayton was brought in to help write dialogue and scenes for reshoots and was getting $200,000 a week, sources say. But as work expanded, so did his paycheck. Gilroy, who started in June, was by August taking a leading role with Edwards in postproduction, which lasted well into the fall. The reshoots reportedly tackled several issues, including the ending. The first “stand-alone”…

No documentary feature ever has been nominated for the best picture Oscar. Think about that. Nine foreign-language films, from 1937’s Grand Illusion to 2012’s Amour, have made the cut. And three animated movies — 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, 2009’s Up and 2010’s Toy Story 3 — have been so anointed. But the Academy, which instituted a separate, if not quite equal, category for feature documentaries in 1942, never has seen fit to invite doc filmmakers to sit at the main table — even as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 won Cannes’ Palme d’Or in 2004, and other docs regularly made critics’ year-end top 10 lists. Moore himself tried to break into the best picture circle with Fahrenheit, which, having grossed $222.4 million, still reigns as the most commercially successful doc…

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” wrote Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina in 1873. Ninety years later, August Wilson said pretty much the same thing with his 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fences. Wilson’s play, and Denzel Washington’s intense and riveting new film adaptation, out Dec. 25, examine the roots of unhappiness in a seemingly happy black family in Pittsburgh during the 1950s. These cultural roots, like Alex Haley’s famous novel, extend back through American history, revealing the insidious legacy that modern black families have inherited and how that legacy impacts their hopes, dreams and realities. The Maxson family’s unhappiness results from a toxic mixture of the patriarch’s unapologetic hubris and the pressures of being raised black in a white society…

JON FROSCH David, last year we used this space to lambast Hollywood for being behind the times when it came to gaythemed films; as LGBT rights and acceptance in America gained ground, movies featuring queer characters still mostly felt square and stiflingly noble. But context is everything — and what a difference an election makes. We’re going from Obama, our gayfriendliest POTUS yet, to Trump and Pence, who was a proponent of gay conversion therapy. Whereas Hollywood inevitably looked like it was lagging behind the pace of change represented by Obama’s presidency, now it’ll appear ahead of the curve; each minority-driven movie may register as subversive, or at least progressive, in Trump’s America. So while it’s tempting to cherish every such film as a victory — a sign that an…

When Mike Pence saw Hamilton on Nov. 19, he didn’t expect a postperformance lecture on diversity, but the cast couldn’t resist the opportunity to express their views to the vice president-elect. In 1968, Eartha Kitt, then 41, did something similar with Lady Bird Johnson and later felt it seriously damaged her career. Debuting on Broadway in 1943, Kitt, born dirtpoor on a South Carolina cotton plantation, built a multifaceted show business life that included stage acting, dancing, singing (a come-hither 1953 hit version of “Santa Baby”) and movies. When she made the 1958 film Anna Lucasta with Sammy Davis Jr., THR said her performance “is best summarized by the word ‘great.’ ” In 1953, Kitt was making $10,000 per week ($90,000 today) singing at the El Rancho Vegas casino/hotel. By…

MTV president Chris McCarthy is cleaning house just a month into the job. The third leader of the youth-targeting network in the past two years has led Viacom sibling VH1 to its biggest ratings growth in 15 years in 2016 and hopes to bring MTV back into the daily conversation. That means eliminating several unscripted series that don’t resonate with his brand vision, including Prison High, Air Sex, Almost Impossible Game Show, Acting Out, Down to Earth and Stupid Man, Smart Phone, with more potentially joining them on the scrap heap. (Safe for now is ratings hit Teen Mom, though that could be refreshed.) “The opportunity for MTV is to embody everything it is to be young — optimistic, hopeful, idealistic, diverse, messy and fun,” McCarthy tells THR of his…

More than 10 million tourists flock to Hollywood’s Walk of Fame each year, but on Oct. 27, James Otis wasn’t there to snap a selfie. The political protester instead wielded a sledgehammer and pickax to obliterate Donald Trump’s star. “I thought if I took that symbol away, it would help a lot of people understand that what Trump said [about Latinos and other groups] wasn’t right,” Otis told THR. His pulverization, which netted international headlines, quickly was followed by work to repair Trump’s star. But most damaged stars, many bearing far more of the cultural symbolism Otis cited, receive lesser treatment: Onefifth of the 2,500-plus stars are in disrepair after decades of neglect, THR has found. Longtime Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Leron Gubler acknowledges this figure matches…

It’s the stuff of dreams. On Feb. 27, 2011, producers Iain Canning, a Brit, and Emile Sherman, an Aussie, won the Oscar for best picture for The King’s Speech — the very first film they made after launching See-Saw Films in 2008, a U.K.-Australian production and financing company. (It also was the first time either attended the Academy Awards.) See-Saw was a bold gamble considering its London and Sydney offices are on opposite ends of the planet, but the payoff was immediate. Sherman and Canning — who talk almost every day but can go several months without seeing each other — have deep connections in their respective film communities, plus are able to tap into generous government-backed film funds and tax incentives in both locales. They cover the rest of…

HALFWAY THROUGH THIS year’s Actor Roundtable, just as THR’s group was settling in with one another, Casey Affleck paused to look at Jeff Bridges with something bordering on awe. “Jeff,” he said, “not to draw attention to your age or anything, but I just want to point out that when I was born in 1975, you had already worked with Peter Bogdanovich, John Huston and Robert Benton.” “Yeah,” Bridges shrugged. “So you were bushed before I was born, man,” said Affleck. That gives some idea of the warmth that flowed among the group, one of THR’s younger-skewing actor gatherings, with Bridges, 67 (Hell or High Water), playing patriarch to Affleck, 41 (Manchester by the Sea); Mahershala Ali, 42 (Moonlight); Andrew Garfield, 33 (Hacksaw Ridge, Silence); Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 35 (Snowden); and…

In this brave new world of posttruth politics and fake news stories, Hollywood is enjoying a boom in reality-based movies. From biopics to true-crime thrillers to state-of-the-nation docudramas, stories based on real people and events look certain to dominate the Oscar nominations in January. But reality can be overrated, and truth inconvenient. The worst true-story movies often are those most faithful to the surface facts: prosaic procedurals, boiled-down biographies and schematic attempts to impose narrative logic on complex lives. Such films show the price of everything and the value of nothing. The best of them, like great fairy tales, mix facts with a shot of artistic license. “Art is the lie that tells the truth,” Pablo Picasso once said. Or was that quote invented by a screenwriter? In recent years,…

Did Jeremy Clarkson, former host of the BBC hit Top Gear, inadvertently divulge what Jeff Bezos has planned for his Amazon Prime streaming service? “Amazon has gone global,” Clarkson tweeted Nov. 16 before the launch of his new motoring series The Grand Tour, which he co-hosts with James May and Richard Hammond. In a video, the trio said the Amazon show would be available in more than 200 countries. The comments sparked industry buzz that Clarkson may know something CEO Bezos hasn’t revealed — namely that it will expand its video service globally to challenge Netflix. Amazon has declined to confirm global aspirations, but some believe it’s inevitable for a company whose e-commerce service is in fewer than 20 countries and whose streaming video offering operates only in the U.S.,…

Industry leaders who went all in for Hillary Clinton, from execs (Jeffrey Katzenberg, Bob Iger) to creators (J.J. Abrams, Shonda Rhimes), may be reeling from defeat, but they also are looking for new standard bearers with national potential, including California’s first African-American U.S. senator. “Kamala Harris is going to hit the ground running,” says Gotham Group founder Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, who served on Clinton’s national finance committee alongside her husband, entertainment attorney and California delegate Jon Vein. “[New Jersey Sen.] Cory Booker is going to be an important part of the future of the party. [U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development] Julian Castro, who would have likely held a major role in Hillary’s administration,” is one to watch, she adds, as well as “Eric Garcetti, who is leading one of…

During a recent U.S. Senate Subcommittee hearing on the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, bitter industry rivals Ticketmaster and StubHub came together in rare unity to praise the bill. The BOTS Act, expected to pass before Christmas, would make it illegal to use software to buy mass quantities of tickets online. Ticket “bots” are why good seats often are hard to find and why hot acts such as Hamilton and Adele increasingly are trying to pre-empt the secondary market by offering highpriced tickets of their own. The new bill is the latest salvo in the grinding war over how tickets should be sold (and resold) and, more importantly, who should profit. In an ironic twist for artists and fans who grew to hate Ticketmaster and its high service fees in…

ON NOV. 14, 2015, BANKER, hedge fund manager and Hollywood film investor Steven Mnuchin celebrated his engagement to Scottish actressproducer Louise Linton with a champagne-and-caviar party in the flower-filled Crystal Ballroom at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Among the guests dancing to the cover band that night was embattled Relativity Media founder Ryan Kavanaugh — perhaps surprising given that colleagues say Kavanaugh just months earlier bitterly had blamed Mnuchin’s OneWest bank, which had made significant loans to Relativity, for pushing his company into bankruptcy by abruptly pulling millions of dollars from one or more of its accounts. This wasn’t an ordinary quarrel between lender and creditor: From October 2014 through May 2015, Mnuchin simultaneously had served as chairman of OneWest and co-chairman of Relativity. He quietly had exited Relativity a few…

There is, it turns out, a not-so-simple trick to playing Jackie Kennedy. “I watched her on film and listened to her on tape, and I realized she had two different voices,” Natalie Portman explains as she settles into a chair in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills, where she’s been holed up doing media interviews ahead of the Dec. 2 opening of Jackie, Fox Searchlight’s impressionistic $9 million biopic of the iconic first lady. “She had one voice when she was speaking in public. It was very feminine, coy and breathy. But she had another when she was speaking in private. Faster, deeper, much more biting. I learned both voices.” In addition to mastering the icon’s tone-switching, the 35-year-old Oscar winner also had to figure out how Jacqueline Kennedy walked,…