Innholdsfortegnelse for Emmy Special 1 June 2017 i The Hollywood Reporter

Footwear First Designing the color-coded uniforms for various classes of people in the totalitarian theocracy in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale presented several challenges for costume designer Ane Crabtree. Symbolism was paramount, since even the smallest details (like the handmaids’ laced boots) give viewers clues. “The boot symbolism, all the laces, shows a kind of mental oppression,” she says. “The wings, or bonnets, on the heads of the handmaids, as birthed by Margaret Atwood [who wrote the novel on which the series is based], were a way to control their gaze. It is also a kind of mind control — making them feel like little girls in bonnets to take away their power.” There was no shortage of source material for The Young Pope’s costume designer Carlo Poggioli, who referenced “paintings and sculptures from hundreds…

THE CROWN (Netflix) Most of this period drama about Queen Elizabeth II is filmed on location throughout the U.K. The rest is shot at London’s Elstree Studios. Eight locations and sets were used just to depict various parts of Buckingham Palace, such as this entrance. It belongs to Lancaster House, which was completed in 1840 and is situated near the real palace. “We used minimal [set] dressing, choosing to magnify [its] vastness,” says production designer Martin Childs. “Examples of how we exploited the scale are the use of the staircase and hallway to assemble the family for Elizabeth’s wedding and to show how cold and unfriendly Buckingham Palace is compared to [Elizabeth’s preferred] Clarence House.” Lancaster previously was used for Buckingham Palace in The King’s Speech and Downton Abbey. WESTWORLD…

Jude Law hadn’t been on many shortlists to play a pope. So when Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) picked the rakish 44-year-old Oscar nominee to tackle a scheming, reactionary pontiff on HBO’s The Young Pope, head-scratching ensued. During the course of the series’ 10 episodes, however, Law’s take on Pius XIII (nee Lenny Belardo) prompted numerous think pieces comparing the character to Donald Trump and even more memes with his kangaroo co-star. As the star looks to his next project (playing a young Dumbledore in Warner Bros.’ Fantastic Beasts sequel), Law tells THR about the unique pontifical gig and its recently greenlighted follow-up. The Young Pope got a lot of attention from critics drawing parallels between Lenny Belardo and Donald Trump. Were you surprised by how timely the…

You’re the Worst wrapped its third Emmy-contending season on a hot, dualunit day last September. The two scenes couldn’t have been more different. In downtown Los Angeles, leads Aya Cash and Chris Geere were enjoying a playful game of “You Dropped Something,” in which their characters, Gretchen and Jimmy, taunt passers-by as they spend an afternoon drinking. The scene ultimately would get cut from the finale. Elsewhere, Desmin Borges and guest star Collette Wolfe were filming Edgar and Dorothy’s breakup in a sparsely decorated Echo Park apartment that, at the end of the season, would become the home of Kether Donohue’s struggling Lindsay. The FXX half-hour, created by Stephen Falk (Orange Is the New Black), is the anti-romantic comedy — Jimmy and Gretchen are two horrible people who are great…

COMEDY DRAMA LIMITED Damian Lewis BILLIONS (SHOWTIME) Lewis portrays hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod, whose questionable — and likely illegal — methods are at odds with a U.S. district attorney (Paul Giamatti) hell-bent on taking him down. FAVORITE THING ABOUT HIS CHARACTER “Ax is a guy who treads a thin line between right and wrong, between ethical and unethical. There’s something heroic in his endeavors that I like about him. I’d love to spend an evening with him. I think there’s a great heart and soul in there, but he’s a badass, too. I like his quick-wittedness. I like his thinking. I like his ruthlessness. There’s a gangster in there, but also there’s a guy who has subscribed fully to the idea of the American dream — a blue-collar guy who…

Hair and makeup departments made stunning moves this year, from reconstructing two very differentlooking actors — Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Flynn — into two iterations of Albert Einstein to reshaping the iconic Jessica Lange into an icon from another era, Joan Crawford. Not to be outdone, team Fargo’s handiwork buffed and polished Ewan McGregor into two very different-looking brothers. Perhaps no makeovers drew as much attention as the transformations of Alec Baldwin (into Donald Trump) and Melissa McCarthy (into Sean Spicer) during Saturday Night Live’s unforgettable 42nd season on NBC. So uncanny was Baldwin’s Trump that in February, Dominican Republic newspaper El Nacional mistakenly published a photo of the star in costume, instead of an actual photo of the president, to accompany a news story. “Alec showed me that and…

SOUND EDITING 1 TIMELESS (NBC) “On each episode, we were taken to a different period in time,” says Wade Barnett, supervising sound editor of the series about time travel. “We had to pull new sounds for the cars, guns, planes and backgrounds that would match the time period of the episode. The other main focus was building the sound design of the time machines. It’s very subjective as to what an actual time machine would sound like, and we had a lot of fun experimenting with different ideas and dialing in those elements. We had a constantly evolving sound design template for each of the two time machines in the show.” 2 STRANGER THINGS (Netflix) “Our biggest challenge was creating new sounds and building interesting atmospheres that fit the show,”…

THE NIGHT OF (HBO) Cinematographer Igor Martinovic already has won an American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award for his work on this HBO limited series, about a mysterious murder that takes place in New York City. His approach to the visuals was based on the concept of reduction. “We consciously deprived the audience of crucial information in order to get them engaged,” he says. “This concept derives directly from the storyline, in which no one knows what happened on the night of the crime. The main inspirations for the framing of the series were works by two of my favorite photographers, Robert Frank and Saul Leiter. They often use framing to create a mystery through obscuring scenes or protagonists in their photographs.” THE HANDMAID’S TALE (Hulu) In this series,…

Of all the characters Hank Azaria has created during the past 30 years — including at least a dozen on The Simpsons alone — the one that might turn out to be his most personal is Jim Brockmire, the alcoholic has-been baseball announcer at the center of the IFC comedy Brockmire, which got a season-two renewal in April. Azaria, 53, debuted the character in 2010 on an episode of HBO’s Funny or Die Presents and has reprised it over the years in podcasts and other appearances. He even fought a court battle with actor and comic Craig Bierko over Bierko’s similar sportscaster voice (Azaria won). Then, last year, IFC approached Azaria, who has an 8-year-old son with wife Katie Wright, about making a Brockmire show. It’s the first TV lead…

On series such as NBC’s This Is Us, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and HBO’s Westworld, storylines frequently jump from place to place and from one time period to another — presenting something of an obstacle course for their editors. They have to make all those jumps seamless while ensuring the audience can follow along without getting lost, which, in turn, often necessitates the effective use of flashbacks. Consider the ensemble drama This Is Us, which revolves around the life of the Pearson family: Rebecca and Jack and their children, Kate, Kevin and Randall. It follows the kids from birth through their childhood to their mid-30s. And that means weaving together multiple storylines that reveal the lives of each of the characters at crucial turning points. “The overarching goal is to…

AMERICAN GODS (Starz) For this shot from the fantasy series based on Neil Gaiman’s best-selling novel about mythological gods roaming around current-day America, actors Emily Browning and Chris Obi (as the Egyptian god of the afterlife, Anubis) performed on a 12-by- 20-foot bluescreen stage in Toronto. Everything, including the sand on which they stood, was replaced digitally by Cinesite’s visual effects team in postproduction. “We had been to this environment before [in a previous episode], but this time it’s not as beautiful,” explains Kevin Haug, the series’ visual effects designer. “It’s stunning, but it’s kind of dark and toxic.” To evoke that feeling, says Haug, the team made the sand black. “The biggest challenge with sand is scale,” he adds. “We know how it works, but it’s fine, with so…

Just as Westworld’s co-creator Lisa Joy is revealing how much (or little) the actors in her sweeping HBO drama know about where their characters are headed, the power in the Hollywood soundstage where she and five other showrunners are gathered on this early April afternoon goes out. Queen Sugar showrunner Ava DuVernay, 44, leaps out of her chair, while the others — Noah Hawley, 50; Ryan Murphy, 52; Jenji Kohan, 47; and David E. Kelley, 61 — sit frozen in silence as a string of nearby lightbulbs shatter. Left to their own devices, the six present, among the most talented figures in the art of dramatic storytelling, could craft some harrowing, twisty, culturally resonant narrative about what has just happened. But before they can put their heads together, the group…