Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2, 2017 i The Hollywood Reporter

On July 27, Richard Plepler’s worst corporate nightmare unfolded. The HBO CEO learned that his company’s network had been breached by an apparently coordinated cyberattack that experts explained could expose a staggering 1.5 terabytes of data. That would be roughly seven times the size of the epic 2014 hack of Sony Pictures. The attack was sophisticated, insiders tell THR, targeting specific content and data housed in different locations, suggesting multiple points of entry. Even more chilling, there was no ransom demand, say sources, leaving the motive in question and raising the specter that video footage, internal documents or even email correspondence could be leaked. Two days later, HBO sent an alarming email on a Saturday to its 2,500-plus employees, notifying them that the company had been hit, and a day…

When former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman made the splashy announcement last fall that he was selling his production company Dichotomy Creative Group to Chinese film studio Le Vision Entertainment, he said: “We’re not launching a company that is funded by a Chinese business, but a Chinese movie studio right here in Los Angeles.” The timing of Goodman’s deal wasn’t great, arriving as it did just before Matt Damon’s The Great Wall — co-produced by Le Vision, Legendary East and Universal — flopped spectacularly, and the Chinese studio’s parent company, LeEco, began to slowly implode. Founded in 2004 by Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting, LeEco began as a streaming video service that was once dubbed the “Netflix of China.” Having burnt through billions, Jia has since seen Chinese courts seize shares…

We first saw Carrie Fisher in the flesh at the Attitude Awards in London in October 2014. She was presenting an award to Graham Norton, and she made a speech that was so rude and irreverent and funny that she managed to at once charm and insult everyone present. Rob Delaney and I were at that point writing our first season of Catastrophe. We’d written the part of Rob’s dreadful mother and my character’s mother-in-law, Mia, and were mid-brainstorm for who could play her. We watched Carrie onstage, and I turned to Rob and said, “That’s Mia. That’s your mother.” We spent the next few days trying to find an “in” because we assumed the traditional route of approaching her agent would lead nowhere. So Rob tweeted her, I tweeted…

Weddings Vince Totino, CEO of Revolution Studios, married Shannon Vann on July 12 in Lake Como, Italy. Engagements CAA agent Amia Lazarus and UTA agent Mike Esola became engaged July 2 in Belize. Births Andrew Weitz, founder of the style consultancy firm The Weitz Effect and a THR contributor, and wife Stacy, vp communications Sony Pictures Entertainment, welcomed sons Alexander Davis and Benjamin Riley on July 27 at Cedars- Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Congrats Sony Pictures Television Studios promoted Jeff Frost to president and Jason Clodfelter and Chris Parnell to co-presidents July 24. Rob Sharenow was elevated to president of programming for A+E Networks and Eli Lehrer was tapped as executive vp programming at History, Paul Cabana as executive vp at Biography and History Digital, and Thomas Moody…

FremantleMedia Group, based in London, has 3,000 employees working across 31 markets, meaning CEO Cecile Frot-Coutaz rarely has time to fixate on one country, let alone a single show in the Bertelsmannowned company’s global suite of 423 programs. But she made an exception during the first half of 2017 for American Idol. Once the company’s gilded show pony, the talent competition was absent from U.S. airwaves for the first time in 15 years. To ensure a revivial, the married mother of two daughters, ages 13 and 8, became a regular again at the Burbank office she had called home for a decade. Ultimately, ABC struck a deal to bring Idol back in 2018 with original host Ryan Seacrest, $25 million judge Katy Perry and, producers hope, some respectable fraction of…

In 2002, after the NBA inked the first major deal to bring basketball to cable, then-NBC Sports chair Dick Ebersol famously commemorated the blow to his network by gifting league commissioner David Stern with a 100-foot coaxial cord. But the NBA likely won’t need that cable for much longer. Streaming services are poised to replace cable networks as the upstarts encroaching on the live-sports spoils the Big Four broadcasters once enjoyed. This year, digital giants from Amazon to Facebook have tested the waters of live game broadcasts, viewing the events as a chance to grow audiences as they turn more attention to video. The leagues hope these deeppocketed entrants are saviors amid growing concerns that live sports, long believed immune to audience declines and soft ad rates, is vulnerable —…

As the NFL’s players head back to the field for the 2017 season, so, too, do the cheerleaders — who also are heading to court. In recent years, at least five NFL teams — the Oakland Raiders, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Cincinnati Bengals, Buffalo Bills and New York Jets — have faced lawsuits from their cheerleaders over pay. Kelsey K., one of the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against the NFL and its member teams, trained for two decades as a dancer before beating out dozens of other women for one of a handful of spots on the San Francisco 49ers’ Gold Rush Girls. Yet, in spite of her demonstrated skills and being told by the team that she was an integral part of the game-day experience, K., who was…

Saturday Night Live NBC SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES First-timers Vanessa Bayer and Leslie Jones landed surprise nominations alongside 2016 winner Kate McKinnon (also nominated in 2014 and 2015). For Bayer, it’s bittersweet recognition of her final SNL season — the most watched in more than two decades, which nabbed the late-night stalwart the most noms (22 in all) in its 40-plus-year history. GUEST ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES Dave Chappelle (left) hosted two nights after Trump’s presidential win; Tom Hanks (center), in his ninth outing as host, created the inimitable David S. Pumpkin; and Lin-Manuel Miranda brought Hamilton magic to his opening monologue with a riff on his musical’s hit “My Shot.” GUEST ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES This is the second time Melissa McCarthy (left) is up…

The Emoji Movie’s $24.5 million domestic opening during the July 28 to 30 weekend accomplished what no other movie has been able to do during a tough summer season at the box office — survive an abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score (7 percent) and open in line with prerelease tracking. One weapon? Sony wouldn’t let reviews post until midday on July 27, hours before the pic began playing in previews ahead of rolling out everywhere. Sony, like every studio, is looking for its own basket of rotten eggs to throw at review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes in hopes of combating a bad “Tomatometer” score. That means screening some titles later and later for critics. “What other wide release with a score under 8 percent has opened north of $20 million? I don’t…

Starting in 2020, the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers — now relocated to the city where they were born after 56 seasons in San Diego — will share the stadium being built in Inglewood by L.A. Rams owner Stan Kroenke. Until then, the new arrivals will play 20 miles south in Carson, at StubHub Center, the smallest NFL venue in decades — one of a few disadvantages the team faces relative to the Rams, who saw their own splashy (if not victorious) return to L.A. a year ago. Still, such stars as Owen Wilson and Mike Fleiss will make the trek to cheer on the Chargers at their preseason opener against the Seahawks on Aug. 13. And while CAA’s Avi Wasserman, a San Diego native, says his team’s move was like…

Drag La La Land Gets Damien’s Thumbs-Up Remember how in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, audiences didn’t get to see the career-launching, one-woman show of Emma Stone’s Mia Dolan (save her reserving a seat for Ryan Gosling’s character, who never appears)? Groundlings regular Jimmy Fowlie has rectified this with his solo production So Long, Boulder City (co-written with Bridesmaids actor Jordan Black, who also directs), currently enjoying an extended sold-out run at Hollywood’s 47-seat Celebration Theatre. In Fowlie’s version, Mia’s dad is a drug addict, her actress aunt (yes, the one who lives in Paris) is schizophrenic and Mia goes through an energetic party-girl phase. The night THR attended, Helen Hunt was there, and a rep for the theater says Stone’s mother also checked out a performance. And though the…

Marty and I started in the months before Disneyland opened. I began in 1954, he started in ’55. Walt Disney put him to work doing some writing and really trusted Marty, even though he was just 19 or 20. They got very close, and Marty absorbed Walt’s philosophy about how you tell stories in a theme-park setting. Marty then became the best mentor you could have for thousands of imagineers, sharing Walt’s wisdom about the things that keep Americans strong, how you treat people right and how you tell stories to families in a joyful, meaningful manner. In October 1954, ABC’s Disneyland show went on the air. Walt was the host and knew what he wanted to say, but he wasn’t an actor. Marty, though, understood how to put Walt’s…

Founded in 1926 by Merv Griffin’s uncle, Elmer, the Westside Tennis Club burned bright in the Los Angeles social scene in Hollywood’s Golden Age. But for the past several decades, the Motor Avenue hangout — more recently known as the Beverly Hills Country Club despite not being in Beverly Hills— has blended quietly into sleepy Cheviot Hills near the Fox lot. That is about to change. On July 29, the 91-year-old tennis and social club, whose heyday saw Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn among its ranks, unveiled an entirely new look following a two-year, $13 million renovation. “We stayed within the existing footprint that we inherited, but we took the building down to the studs,” says Graham Culp, a partner with Meriwether Companies, which in 2015 bought the property and…

CABLE SPORTS’ SUBSCRIBER WOES ESPN and FS1 see losses as NBCSN banks a rare uptick in households GOOD DEALS DON’T LAST FOREVER The major leagues already have started to turn their attention to digital dollars years before major broadcasting contracts begin to expire Previous page, “Ready to Cut the Cord?” source: THR research. “Cable Sports” source: ESPN/NBCSN: Company filings; FS1: THR research, Nielsen data. “Good Deals” source: THR research. *Speed relaunched as FS1 in August 2013.…

UFC president Dana White likes Conor McGregor’s odds of defeating boxing champ Floyd Mayweather Jr. at their Aug. 26 bout. “I love all the naysayers,” says White, 48. “It sets up the biggest upset in sports history.” McGregor, an MMA star who has no pro boxing experience, is an underdog. But the odds in Las Vegas are tightening, and analysts also are predicting that the fight could surpass the recordsetting 4.6 million pay-per-view buys brought in by Mayweather’s much-hyped 2015 fight with Manny Pacquiao. The timing of the spectacle couldn’t be better for UFC owners WME-IMG (which bought the MMA organization in 2016 from Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta III for $4 billion), which is in the midst of negotiating new TV rights deals for UFC and banking on a hefty…

In January 2015, two years before he was sworn in as president, Donald Trump was set to step into the same role in a very different capacity: He had signed on to play the president in 2015’s Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! Producers’ first choice to play the leader of the free world in the Washington, D.C.-set disaster film was Sarah Palin, but negotiations with the former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee had fallen through. That’s when Ian Ziering, the gung-ho star of the schlocky Syfy franchise, had the inspiration to capitalize on the special relationship he’d developed with Trump while taping Celebrity Apprentice (Ziering made it as far as the penultimate task). His reality TV boss would make a good commander in chief, he reasoned. An offer went…

If you want to see a good show with the potential to be very good shoot itself in the foot and become something you don’t want to watch, then Netflix’s dramedy Atypical, from The Goldbergs writer and co-executive producer Robia Rashid, is for you. (I guess that makes it more of a tragedy than a dramedy.) What starts off as a well-written look at autism and its impact on a family, full of humor and heart, suddenly makes some bone-headed, network-TV-level decisions that reduce the series to an easily digestible, “TGIF”-styled disappointment. I don’t mean to cast all of broadcast in a dark light, of course, since ABC’s Speechless is an infinitely better show cut from similar cloth. What’s depressing about Atypical (the first season of which consists of eight…

Though Stephen King has a producing credit on The Dark Tower — Columbia’s big-screen continuation of the famed author’s eight-part supernatural Western series of books — he doesn’t appear in the film. But King, 69, has been in more than a dozen movies and TV shows based on his writings. Though most have been cameos, in 1982 he co-starred in the George Romero-directed, fivepart anthology movie Creepshow. (Romero, who died July 16 at age 77, pioneered the zombie apocalypse genre with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. “There will never be another like you,” King tweeted about his fellow horror icon after learning of his death.) THR called Creepshow “a comic book come to life as a horror film” that offers “a potion that seems sure to bubble up with…

When Will Packer set a meeting the weekend of July 23 with OWN staff to kick off his new producing deal at the network, Oprah Winfrey was sure to be there in person. The CEO’s presence emphasized the importance of the channel’s relationship with the red-hot Girls Trip producer as it navigates an ultracompetitive market for A-list black talent. Earlier in July, writer-director-producer Tyler Perry, whose partnership with OWN since 2012 had helped the network find stability during its rocky infancy, announced a massive overall deal at rival Viacom under which he will produce 90 episodes of TV annually for BET and other Viacom cable networks and work with the Paramount movie studio. Since then, OWN has unveiled several new collaborations, among them the Packer deal, which will see him…

Remember when 3D was Hollywood’s savior? In 2010, 21 percent of box-office revenue in North America ($10.6 billion) came from 3D ticket sales. Fast-forward to 2016, and 3D’s share of revenue was just 14 percent. So it was not a surprise when Imax announced July 26 that it would be reducing its 3D slate in the domestic market, citing a “clear preference” for 2D. While the format remains popular overseas — globally, 56 percent of all digital screens are 3D, compared to 39 percent in the U.S. and Canada — ComScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian says much of the blame for 3D’s decline in the states falls on Hollywood, thanks to too many shoddy conversions to 3D. “You had many movies that were not originally conceived or shot in…

The kingdoms Asgard and Wakanda may be worlds apart, but backstage at San Diego Comic-Con, the teams behind Disney and Marvel’s two upcoming superhero tentpoles — Thor: Ragnarok (Nov. 3) and Black Panther (Feb. 16) — seemed more like long-lost friends than intergalactic strangers. THR gathered the stars and helmers of both films, along with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, for a class photo just minutes before they took the biggest geek stage in the world. Panther director Ryan Coogler, who hadn’t seen his cast for months, filled them in on the epic fight scene they were about to see for the first time along with the Hall H audience, who gave it a rapturous standing ovation. While Panther villain Michael B. Jordan and Thor director Taika Waititi were spotted joking like old friends, Comic-Con newbies like Daniel Kaluuya were meeting their…

As the competition heats up among collectors to own the newest, fastest and rarest — i.e., limitedproduction, multimillion-dollar hypercars — luxury brands are adopting increasingly onerous vetting processes to select the lucky few. In the past, if you could write the check, the car was yours. But now, panels of judges evaluate online applications to assess such factors as past multiple purchases, social media profile and a track record of not flipping such investments for profit — nor having these cars idle as garage queens. Ford, a brand not otherwise known as a rarefied player, delivered thousands of rejection letters after it received more than 6,500 online applications for 750 units of the new GT (starting price: $450,000), which won 2016’s 24 Hours of Le Mans race in France. Boilerplate…

ALEX RODRIGUEZ RAISES AN arm to keep an errant basketball from hitting a reporter. We are seated courtside in plastic chairs at the gym at Wayside Baptist Church — a complex of low-slung white stucco buildings in Kendall, Florida, a suburb southwest of Miami, near where Rodriguez grew up. It is a Thursday in July, and Rodriguez wears dark-wash jeans and a navy polo shirt with a small white A-Rod Corp logo — an abstraction of the erstwhile Yankee slugger’s signature arching swing — on his left breast. Today he is filming a pilot for CNBC called Back in the Game, a concept that has Rodriguez mentoring down-and-out former athletes. The first episode features Joe Smith Jr., a 1995 NBA No. 1 draft pick whose peripatetic career included an unfortunate…

The swirling turmoil around whether or not NFL teams are reluctant to sign Colin Kaepernick because of his outspoken politics reminds me of a restaurant near my home called The Quiet Woman that features a headless woman on its logo. The name, common among English pubs, honors a 15th century literary character who had her head cut off due to her religious beliefs. This preference, mostly in the NFL, for “headless” athletes who remain quiet about politics during one of the most tumultuous times in American history is a throwback to an era when athletes were expected to “shut up and stick to sports.” Those days should be gone. This ’50s-style Father Knows Best paternalism does a disservice to players by hindering their First Amendment rights to join political discourse,…

The number of commercial breaks during NFL games has often bothered viewers — and not just those sprinting to the bathroom or kitchen. To wit, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell this year wrote a letter to fans addressing the barrage of ad breaks that follow touchdowns and subsequent kickoffs, commiserating, “I hate that, too.” Good news: Goodell will deliver on his promise to streamline the at-home viewing experience this season. The solution is to decrease the number of breaks to four per quarter, down from the previous 5-6-5-5 pattern, which often forced networks to squeeze more than a half-dozen breaks into a 15-minute playing period. That meant eight or nine minutes away from game action. Sports media expert Marc Ganis, president of the marketing firm Sportscorp, tells THR: “That’s way too…

WOULD YOU be interested in a story on Angelyne’s true identity?” the man wrote last fall under a pseudonym, referring to the enigmatic L.A. billboard diva who has been a pop culture icon of self-creation and self-marketing since the early 1980s — and is now regarded as a forerunner to Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and every personal-brand hustler on social media. “I have many details on her life — all well documented — from when her parents met to early adulthood. It’s very different from her public, concocted story — and more interesting.” Angelyne is one of the vanishingly few contemporary public figures whose background has remained shrouded in mystery, along with the conceptual artist Banksy, Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto and aircraft hijacker D.B. Cooper. The man, who claimed to work…

AT&T Audience Network’s Mr. Mercedes is a relative rarity: an effective Stephen King TV adaptation boosted by strong performances and smart writing choices (from a team led by David E. Kelley and including Dennis Lehane). The series starts in 2009 as people queue up before dawn for an Ohio job fair. Out of the chilly mist, a stolen Mercedes appears with a masked man behind the wheel, and it accelerates into the crowd. Carnage. Two years later, Bill Hodges (Brendan Gleeson), the investigator whose career was ended by his obsession with the unsolved crime, is stirred out of an alcohol-fueled haze by online videos from the killer. Brady (Harry Treadaway) is ready to strike again, and only Bill can stop him, assisted by neighbor Jerome (Moonlight’s Jharrel Jerome) and Janey…