Innholdsfortegnelse for December 6, 2017 Double Issue i The Hollywood Reporter

On Dec. 1, NBC News president Noah Oppenheim gathered shellshocked staffers for an afternoon Nightly News meeting. It was two days after the network abruptly fired Matt Lauer, its biggest star and the linchpin of its $500 milliona- year Today franchise, amid allegations of sexual misconduct. At the meeting, according to sources present, Oppenheim was defiant. He said he knew as much about Lauer’s behavior as “anyone who has walked into a supermarket in the last 20 years.” And he warned that those at NBC News who covered for Lauer would face “severe” consequences. One female NBC News staffer says the missive was poorly received, noting somewhat incredulously that it was “management that failed” employees. (Former NBC News execs including Jeff Zucker and Steve Capus also denied knowledge of what…

If all had gone as planned, Warner Bros. Pictures president and chief content officer Toby Emmerich was expecting to ring in the new year by celebrating two key developments at the film studio: a box-office recovery in 2017 and AT&T’s $85.4 billion acquisition of parent company Time Warner. Instead, on Nov. 20, executives across all divisions of the empire were jolted when the Trump administration sued to block the merger on anti-trust grounds. Now, with the cloud of uncertainty over the studio’s future, Emmerich, who is approaching his one-year anniversary in the job, is aggressively trying to fill out its 2019 slate — 2018 releases are already set — with the aim of releasing 17 to 20 movies. To reach that goal, Warners will take over The Six Billion Dollar…

Art World 29Rooms, the uber-Instagrammable installation (“one-part fun house, one-part museum,” says Refinery29 creative director Piera Gelardi) that’s been a sensation in New York for three years running, makes its L.A. debut Dec. 7-10 and Dec. 14-17 with rooms created by Margot Robbie, Jill Soloway, Janelle Monae, Emma Roberts, Demi Lovato and more. “Designing the room brought me back to being a kid, when your room is your sacred space and where your creativity starts with what you choose to put on your walls, on your shelves and on display,” says Roberts, who with Karah Preiss will bring to life their online Belletrist book club, complete with oversized typewriter spouting Joan Didion quotes. Monae’s “What’s Your Frequency” room is a commentary on mass surveillance, while Robbie’s “Trophy Room” taps into…

Matt Lauer Has Movie Audiences Groaning Matt Lauer may be gone from the small screen, but he’s still popping up on the big one. The former Today host, who was fired Nov. 29 from NBC after complaints about inappropriate sexual behavior, appears in Lady Bird, A24’s Bush-era coming-of-age drama; in one scene, star Saoirse Ronan watches Lauer on a newscast reporting about the war in Afghanistan. At a recent screening at the ArcLight Santa Monica, Lauer’s appearance prompted groans throughout the sold-out theater. Meanwhile, Neon’s I, Tonya contains another bit of Lauer, with footage of him reporting on the 1994 attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan included in a montage sequence. Reps for that film, which premiered a day before the scandal broke, wouldn’t comment when asked if there’d been…

In late February, Steven Spielberg hit a wall. Six years after he had started work on the drama The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara — and just weeks before he was due to start filming in Italy — he couldn’t find a boy to play the lead. In need of distraction, he picked up a spec screenplay that his CAA agents had sent him and fell in love. The Papers, as the script was then called, didn’t just tell the story of The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham, both of whom he knew; it also touched on one of the most relevant issues of the day: freedom of the press. After mulling things over, he told his longtime production partner Kristie Macosko Krieger that he was going to shut…

WHERE THE MOVIES SHOT As is often the case, Toronto stood in for several metropolitan cities, and even Detroit didn’t film in the Motor City Fact vs. Fiction While biopics often have a strong presence in the race, fictional stories outweigh films based on true tales, this year and historically David vs. Goliath For decades, studios ruled, but in the past 25 years (and in this year’s race), indie films have sped ahead to become the majority Traveling Through the Decades, One Movie at a Time Whether it’s a visit to Queen Victoria in 1887, two different trips to the 1940 battle of Dunkirk or a tour of Italy in the 1980s, there’s a movie for nearly every time period in this year’s race BINGE-WATCH 51 HOURS OF FILM Sitting…

An unofficial prequel to All the President’s Men 41 years after the fact, The Post stirringly dramatizes the tale of how The Washington Post rose to the occasion by publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Punchy and quickpulsed, Steven Spielberg’s latest is a fine example of the big-city newspaper melodrama. The Pentagon Papers comprised a secret study instigated by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, showing the history of U.S. meddling in Vietnamese politics since the early 1950s. The papers also revealed that the Johnson and then-current Nixon administrations lied about U.S. actions there and the prospects for an American victory. A contributor to the report, Daniel Ellsberg had been a State Department analyst in Vietnam for two years and was working for the RAND Corp. when he decided to leak…

First Look H istory is hoping to land its own Game of Thrones with its Jeremy Rennerproduced drama, Knightfall, about the medieval Catholic military order the Knights Templar. Not only is the show one of A+E Networks’ most expensive (more than $5 million an episode), but it also has one of the cable net’s largest marketing budgets. When the series debuts Dec. 6, it’ll become A+E’s third scripted original, following Vikings and Six. Created by Renner’s producing partners Richard Rayner and Don Handfield, Knightfall wasn’t without its own behind-the-scenes drama. During a discussion Nov. 2 in L.A., the cast and crew talked about the fire that ravaged its medieval set (“I cried,” admits showrunner Dominic Minghella) and the cue they took from Star Wars. How did the idea for the…

Memorable moments from a storied history Before 1977’s Star Wars put his career into hyperdrive, Mark Hamill was doing just fine with episodic TV work on such forgettable series as ABC’s The FBI and CBS’ The Manhunter. One standout was the 1974 sitcom The Texas Wheelers. It was centered on a long-absent father who returns to his family in rural Lamont, Texas. “The show was like a discordant reply to The Waltons,” says Hamill, 66. “The scripts were unbelievable, and the critics loved the show.” Wheelers was created by Dale McRaven, who went on to launch 1978’s Mork & Mindy and 1986’s Perfect Strangers. The Hollywood Reporter called the show “a marvelously constructed piece of family comedy.” The sitcom premiered on ABC (where Michael Eisner was then vp programming and…

Weddings Prolific TV producer Greg Berlanti wed recently retired soccer star Robbie Rogers on Dec. 2 in Malibu. The couple became engaged in December 2016 and have a 1-year-old son, Caleb. Dan Cohen, executive vp at 21 Laps and an exec producer on Stranger Things, married Traci Bank on Nov. 4 at the historic Cree Estate in Palm Springs. Michael Clear, president of production at Atomic Monster, officiated. Births Jeff Tobler, a Warner Bros. Television publicity executive, and his wife, singer and jewelry designer Kim DiVine, welcomed son Holden William Tobler on Nov. 2 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. Congrats Global Road Entertainment tapped Lynn Harris as president of worldwide production Nov. 28. A+E Networks promoted Sean Murtagh to senior vp finance Nov. 29. DreamWorks Animation Television named Robert…

Forget the gold watch. Why not just give the man an Oscar? That’s the question confronting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as they decide whether to reward Daniel Day-Lewis for his latest performance — as Reynolds Woodcock, a fastidious, 1950s London fashion designer who’s drawn into a complicated battle of wills with a young woman, played by Vicky Krieps, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. That’s because, in a surprise announcement made in June, a rep for the 60-year-old actor said that his latest performance also will be his final one, that he’s retiring from acting. Normally, that would trigger one of the Academy’s timehonored traditions: the Career Capper Nomination, but given other factors in this year’s best actor race, that sort of nomination might…

The day I thought I could hang up my spurs as a journalist was Dec. 13, 1990. I was at my desk in the Style section at The Washington Post when I heard a gravelly voice say, “Do you sign autographs?” I looked up, and there before me was Ben Bradlee. I had broken a page-one story that day about a federal scientist on detail to the Smithsonian. It wasn’t my first time on the front page, but this was an original, a real investigative piece. This scientist had sold wealthy Safari Club members the opportunity to hunt rare and endangered Asian animals. He then helped them bring home their trophies — which normally could not legally be brought into the U.S. — by saying they were scientific specimens. I…

Gary Oldman had been asked to play Winston Churchill before. There was the time in 2014, for instance, when his longtime manager and producing partner, Douglas Urbanski, pitched him his own homegrown idea for a movie about the portly, cigar-chomping U.K. prime minister. But Oldman said fat chance. “How the hell was I going to do that?” asks the slender 59-year-old actor of playing such a larger-thanlife figure. “It was never going to happen.” Until, that is, it did. Oldman, wearing what may be the most masterful fat suit and prosthetic chubby face ever created for the movies, plays Churchill in Darkest Hour, which opened in select theaters Nov. 22 from Focus Features, ahead of a Dec. 22 wide release. Of course, Churchill has been depicted on film and TV…

More than 150 million people have seen Wu Jing swan-dive off a freighter to take on a gang of pirates in underwater combat, hang from the side of a speeding Jeep in a machine-gun shootout and crash through countless glass windows, but when the star and director of Wolf Warrior 2 enters the lobby of Andaz West Hollywood on this October morning, he’s hobbling on a pair of forearm crutches with a brace wrapped around one knee. “You only saw the thief eating, but you didn’t see him getting beat up,” he wryly offers in Mandarin. It’s a Chinese idiom that basically means no reward comes without hard labor. Applied to Wolf Warrior 2, which at more than $850 million is China’s highest-grossing movie of all time — and the…

A few years ago, Bohdan Slama had an existential crisis. The Czech writer-director didn’t have any projects in the works, and money was running short. Worst of all, he felt like he had no stories left to tell. “I really felt empty. I was really depressed,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Am I at the end of my filmmaking career?’” He started jogging to cope with the stress, and one day, as he was running through the forest, it occurred to him that he might have to ask his parents for help. “In this moment, I started to see myself from the side of my mother,” says Slama, 50. “I have a very nice relationship with her, and I started to think, ‘I’m an adult’ — at my age, in my…

The second season of Peter Morgan’s Netflix drama The Crown is, in one way, a disappointment: Elizabeth, played with regal inscrutability by Claire Foy, is often a secondary character — and her shift to the background over the 10 new episodes is a loss. That doesn’t wholly detract from Morgan’s nuanced exploration of 20th century British royalty. The show returns with the Suez Crisis in 1956 and stretches through the Profumo affair in 1963. When free-spirited sister Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) zings Elizabeth with “You’ve managed to disappear and become invisible while wearing the crown,” it feels cruel yet accurate. She’s the ruler of England, but she’s not going to lead British forces into battle or rescue the government as scandal flares up; she’ll continue a limited advisory role, and The…

European Film Awards Dec. 9 Berlin I t was November 1988 when a few dozen filmmakers came together in Berlin to present the first-ever European Film Awards. Film journalists would later label the EFAs the “European Oscars,” and indeed the nominees for the 30th EFAs, which will be held in Berlin on Dec. 9, include several titles — among them Ruben Ostlund’s art satire The Square, Robin Campillo’s AIDS drama BPM (Beats Per Minute) and Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreal family tale The Killing of a Sacred Deer — that are likely to turn up at the Academy Awards in 2018. But in the beginning, the 40-odd filmmakers who founded the European Film Academy (then called, simply, the European Cinema Society) better resembled a group of naturalists who were concerned with the…

Matt Lauer is said to have behaved inappropriately with a female subordinate at the 2014 Winter Games in Russia. Now his alleged conduct is casting a cloud over the next Olympics two months before NBC Sports heads to Pyeongchang, South Korea. Scrutiny is falling on Mike Tirico, who was suspended at ESPN in the early 1990s amid allegations of sexual harassment. Tirico’s behavior was recounted in two books: Michael Freeman’s ESPN: The Uncensored History, published in 2000, and James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ 2011 book, Those Guys Have All the Fun. NBC Sports hired Tirico away from ESPN in 2016 and announced this year that he will become the new primetime TV host for the games, replacing Bob Costas. Tirico, 50, already appears on NBC’s NFL coverage. And NBC…

Billboard Women in Music Hollywood, Nov. 30 ACLU’s Bill of Rights Gala Beverly Hills, Dec. 3 THR Talks: The Big Sick New York, Nov. 30 ALS Champions for Care and a Cure Gala Santa Monica, Dec. 2 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony Mountain View, California, Dec. 3 Party Crawler Girl Power at Billboard Women in Music “Women have a stronger voice than ever,” Billboard’s Woman of the Year Selena Gomez (3) told THR before her award was presented by her kidney donor, Francia Raisa (3), and Elle Fanning (3) at the Dolby Theatre. Kelly Clarkson (1), receiving her award from Kelly Rowland (2), said from the stage, “It’s nice to be raw, real and honest.” — MARC MALKIN Kaepernick Praised Viola Davis, Gina Rodriguez and Judd Apatow (11) were among the ACLU…

RÉSUMÉ CURRENT TITLE Chairman and CEO, MPAA PREVIOUS JOB U.S. ambassador to France and Monaco BIG HIT Helped broker a deal to sell The Jim Henson Co. to German firm EM.TV for nearly $1 billion. Since Jack Valenti retired as MPAA chairman and CEO in 2004 after a four-decade rule, no one has been able to quite fill his shoes. But in April, Charles Rivkin, 55, was named to the top job, and, unlike his two immediate predecessors — former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman and former Sen. Christopher Dodd — he has roots in the entertainment world as well as politics. The son of the late William R. Rivkin, an ambassador during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Rivkin worked for 15 years at The Jim Henson Co., rising in 2000…

As Mudbound begins, the first scene focuses on two men excavating a hole in an empty field as thunder booms in the distance. They are brothers, played by Jason Clarke and Garrett Hedlund, who are digging a grave for their father. And as they dig, a fierce rain starts to fall, drenching them until they are covered, literally and figuratively, in mud. The challenge facing cinematographer Rachel Morrison: She had to somehow erase the hot Louisiana sun shining brightly during at least half of the scene. That she conquered the elements isn’t in doubt. On Nov. 30, the New York Film Critics awarded her its prize for best cinematography, making her the first woman to receive that award and putting her on track to make history should she secure an…

What if you could put a camera anywhere, at any time in history? What if there were no limits to what you could direct? “That would be suicide,” says Guillermo del Toro, 53 (The Shape of Water), at THR’s Nov. 12 Director Roundtable. “Limits are what give you freedom.” Still, pushed, he admits he would love to film his grandmother, with whom he had a complicated relationship, to check his memory. First-time director Greta Gerwig, 34 (Lady Bird), would shoot Socrates. “He had these dialogues with Diotima, a prostitute in ancient Greece — I would have loved to hear what those women had to say,” she offers. Denis Villeneuve, 50 (Blade Runner 2049), would train his camera on Jesus. Patty Jenkins, 46 (Wonder Woman), would put hers in a high-security…

Gary Oldman can start passing out cigars — if recent British history is any guide, he’s a sure thing to win a BAFTA for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. An Academy Award, however, is still a question mark. Not surprisingly, actors portraying historical British figures have a home field advantage when the highest film honors in England are given out every February at London’s Royal Opera House, even when Oscar hopes have fizzled on this side of the pond. Cate Blanchett won a BAFTA for 1998’s Elizabeth but got beat at the Oscars by Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love; Dame Judi Dench received a BAFTA for her Queen Victoria in 1997’s Mrs. Brown but lost the Oscar to Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets;…

The fourth feature from director Jang Hoon, A Taxi Driver tells the story of the Gwangju Uprising, a watershed event in the evolution of South Korean democracy. It was 1980, and South Koreans had lived under the authoritarian rule of president Park Chung-hee for 16 years until his assassination in 1979. A pro-democracy movement was gaining momentum, but hard-liner Army Gen. Chun Doo Hwan, who had just seized control of the government in a coup, declared martial law and suppressed protests around the country — as well as the press’ reporting on them. Residents of the southwestern city Gwangju refused to back down, and on May 18, soldiers savagely attacked a group of protestors there, beginning a brutal nine-day siege in which the military beat, shot and used bayonets and…

Her Love Boils Bathwater doesn’t sound like it has Oscar contender written all over it when considering that the filmmaker wasn’t a big movie fan, was fired as an assistant director and dropped out of the film business. But this foreign-language hopeful has won 35 international film awards and made its helmer, Ryota Nakano, one of the most in-demand new directors in Japan. “I was about 23 or 24 years old when I decided to be a director, after I’d graduated university really late. I wasn’t even a big film fan when I was young,” recalls Nakano, sitting in his favorite coffee shop in Kawasaki, outside Tokyo, where he writes his scripts. After graduation, Nakano’s early attempt to hone his craft as an assistant director didn’t bode well. “I was…

CineAsia Dec. 11-14 Hong Kong Exhibition Center O ne of the earliest exhibitors to invest in movie theaters in China, the Broadway Cinema chain is now enjoying massive growth. Operated by Edko Films and headquartered in Hong Kong, Broadway is a premium brand that owns 47 cineplexes spread around first- and secondtier Chinese cities. On the eve of CineAsia, Edko CEO Tessa Lau talked to THR about why some Hollywood films don’t work in China, the “irrational” actions of theater owners and the “hijacking” of the local exhibition industry. All of Broadway’s multiplexes are located in China’s firstand second-tier cities, which some say are now saturated. Is there any plan to develop into third- and fourth-tier cities or rural areas? We mostly follow wherever the property developers go since almost…