Innholdsfortegnelse for Aug-14-15 i The Hollywood Reporter

IT’S NOT EXACTLY THE SONY hack, but another breach of online security is the latest cyberwhodunit to stump Hollywood. On July 29, Red Granite Pictures, an independent film backer with credits including The Wolf of Wall Street and the upcoming Will Ferrell comedy Daddy’s Home, filed a lawsuit in California federal court with disturbing echoes of the year’s biggest industry scandal. The company claims someone “unlawfully and without permission obtained access to Plaintiff ’s computer systems,” gathered contact information and sent harassing emails to Red Granite employees and others who have done business with the company. Some allegations are stranger. In the same complaint, Red Granite claims an executive at a company that advises Red Granite on operations and finances was “being physically surveilled” and has received repeated phone calls…

The Gift Los Angeles, July 30 FOR THE WORLD PREMIERE OF ITS FIRST FILM, horror movie The Gift, STX Entertainment took over Regal Cinemas L.A. Live. Directed, written by and starring Joel Edgerton, the film channels stalkers of thrillers past, as a couple, played by Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall, is plagued by mysterious gifts and troubling encounters. The film’s stars Edgerton, Bateman and Hall as well as producers Jason Blum and Rebecca Yeldham attended the rooftop postscreening festivities, where creepy memorabilia like replicas of the monkey-shaped music boxes from the movie were scattered about the venue. (Letters “from” the antagonist were left on attendees’ car windshields.) “The fact that the script was so great [and] my part was good was kind of just icing on the cake,” said Bateman.…

WHEN TREVOR NOAH took the stage July 29 for a Television Critics Association Q&A, the new host of The Daily Show suggested that its focus on cable stalwarts Fox News and CNN soon might shift to BuzzFeed and Gawker. “The way people are absorbing their news in sound bites and headlines and little click links has changed everything,” Noah, 31, told reporters. “The biggest challenge is, how do we bring all of that together?” Comedy Central and its fellow Viacom cable networks are asking the same question. As its target demographic of millennial males increasingly consumes entertainment online, Comedy Central has seen its primetime audience shrink every year since 2012. That slide is familiar to all networks, but Comedy Central’s recent 10 percent decline among adults 18-to-49 is especially troubling…

SET AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF the Cold War, director Guy Ritchie’s stylish remake of the 1960s NBC classic The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (out Aug. 14 from Warner Bros.) stars Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer as a dynamic spy duo fighting the forces of evil (in a twist on the original, the two hail from natural enemy camps: the CIA and the KGB, respectively). Re-imagining the world of ’60s spy-versus-spy fell to production designer Oliver Scholl (Edge of Tomorrow), whose initial research involved a marathon weekend of bingeing on black-and-white reruns of the original show, which ran from 1964 to 1968. Scholl, 51, who studied industrial design in his native Germany, built more than 90 sets, mostly in the U.K. — ranging from a recreation of the Berlin Wall to an…

BIOPICS ABOUT BANDS CONSISTING OF equals are rarer than those about solo artists — and for good reason: Try doing justice to even three performers’ rise from obscurity to fame, and you hardly have time to develop them as characters. As a result, Straight Outta Compton, about the career of gangstarap doorbusters N.W.A, turns into a bio-epic, running well more than two hours without even mentioning the competing strands of hip-hop (from Public Enemy’s righteous anger to the feel-good vibes of De La Soul) that, by contrast, made N.W.A’s furious sound so upsetting to so many people. Produced by former N.W.A members Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and directed by F. Gary Gray (Friday, The Italian Job), the movie predictably softens the edges of careers that generated even more controversy…

DAVID SIMON, CREATOR of HBO’s The Wire, one of TV’s all-time great dramas, never makes things easy — which probably is why he was drawn to Lisa Belkin’s nonfiction book Show Me a Hero, about a public housing dispute in Yonkers, N.Y., that divided a city and destroyed the career of an idealistic mayor. The resulting six-part miniseries, rolled out in double episodes on three consecutive Sunday nights, may have a distinct “eat your vegetables” aroma to it, but the show lures you in with unmistakably first-class storytelling and acting. Written by Simon and William F. Zorzi, Hero is a convincing and insightful examination of race and class in America but also of universal themes of home and family. Idealistic political wonk Nick Wasicsko (the superb Oscar Isaac) is a…

WHILE ZIMBABWE’S Cecil the Lion was done in July 6 by a Minnesota dentist with a compound crossbow, MGM’s Leo the Lion mascot managed to survive the transition from silent to talking pictures, the studio’s multiple bankruptcies and a plane crash in the desert. MGM’s first Leo (of seven) was born in the Dublin Zoo and made his Hollywood debut in 1927, when ad man Howard Dietz took the full-body profile lion trademark he’d come up with nine years earlier for Samuel Goldwyn Pictures and revamped it for the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. But it was a second, 350-pound Leo, born in the Sudan, who was sent on a cross-country plane trip that, while a disaster, became a publicist’s dream. To hype the new studio, Leo II was placed in…

Ari, Meet Francis Ari Emanuel might soon get a chance to hug it out with the pope. Sources say the WME co-CEO and partner Patrick Whitesell are on a shortlist of media players whom Pope Francis has approached for a special meeting at the Vatican this fall. The pontiff apparently is interested in discussing ways to improve the church’s portrayal in Western entertainment and is working with the nonprofit Varkey Foundation to discuss with Hollywood folks. (Producer Brian Grazer, Oprah Winfrey and David Geffen also scored invites.) WME declined to confirm whether the Jewish Emanuel would accept the invitation to break bread with the leader of the Catholic Church. The New Yorker Prepping TMZ Exposé TMZ honcho Harvey Levin soon could get a harsh media spotlight turned on him —…

FROM HIS OFFICE ATOP A BURBANK high-rise, Adam Fogelson has a bird’s-eye view of three major Hollywood studio lots: Warner Bros., Disney and, perhaps fittingly, Universal, where he worked for 15 years, including four as chairman, until he abruptly was ousted in September 2013. Now, Fogelson, 48, is trying with STX Entertainment to do what Relativity Media and even the old DreamWorks couldn’t: challenge the traditional studios by moving in on an area they largely have abandoned, midbudget ($25 million to $75 million), star-driven dramas rather than superhero pics and prebranded tentpoles. And he’s making a lot of them. The 65-employee STX, founded in spring 2014 by industry veteran Robert Simonds and backed by, among others, TPG Capital and China’s Hony Capital (with significant film financing coming from China’s Huayi…

ON JULY 30, DECLARING IT was “hopelessly insolvent,” Ryan Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media, with assets of $560 million but liabilities of a whopping $1.18 billion, filed for bankruptcy protection. Since May, when more than $330 million in outstanding debt came due, Kavanaugh, 40, the wheeler-dealer who co-founded the film and TV company in 2004, had been working furiously to bring in new investors and forestall a default. Many in Hollywood have been predicting Kavanaugh’s downfall for years: After starting his first company at 22 (it failed), he’d secured a foothold in the movie business by bringing in financing to back $500 million studio slates at Sony and Universal. His helicopter-flying lifestyle and outspoken political activism (especially in defense of Israel) made him a target of attention. And when Relativity started releasing…

THE SCENT OF Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle envelopes Angelyne’s hot pink Corvette Stingray 1LT as the legendary — and legendarily mysterious — L.A. billboard queen cruises West Hollywood. She nods her platinum ’do as she passes a beauty store on Santa Monica Boulevard. “I saw Paris Hilton there a month ago,” reminisces Angelyne in her distinct baby-girl voice. “She was wearing no makeup and had her dog. She told me she was inspired by me before she was known. I whispered to her, ‘I’m good luck to you.’ She said, ‘Yeah!’ ” A considered pause. “She’s vapid but sweet.” As it happens, that’s a verdict people have been rendering about Angelyne for 30 years, ever since she began appearing on hundreds of billboards and circumnavigating the city in that pink Vette.…

SIGGRAPH AUG. 9-13 L.A. CONVENTION CENTER AT THIS YEAR’S SIGGRAPH convention, there will be the usual panels about breakthroughs in virtual reality and other cutting-edge developments in computer-generated entertainment. The projected 14,000 attendees at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 42nd annual gathering of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, set to take place Aug. 9 to 13 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, expect nothing less. But one panel in particular will offer a unique peek into an animation process so sophisticated and specialized that only a handful of geniuses have mastered it well enough to succeed in Hollywood: molding lumps of clay with one’s fingers. It indeed is ironic that a convention dedicated to super-high-tech computer graphics would hold a panel for Britain’s Aardman Animations,…

BIG HAIR ISN’T ONLY for the head anymore in Hollywood: Size counts more than ever in the bikini wax industry, a more than $2 billion business in the U.S. alone. Ever since 1994, when seven South American siblings calling themselves J. Sisters brought to the States the Brazilian bikini wax — which can refer to anything from bare to “Bermuda” triangle — the circumference and shape of a lady’s lower landscaping (or “ladyscaping”) have been scrutinized and debated as much as Kim Kardashian’s figure. Now the pendulum is swinging back from the no-hair, virginal va-jay-jay (thanks, Shonda Rhimes) to what’s being hailed as the fullbush Brazilian. Just as men have been morphing from shaved heads and faces to scruffy beards and man buns, women suddenly are embracing a more hirsute,…

If there seems to be more communing among actor types during commercial breaks of the Primetime Emmys telecast Sept. 20, it’s likely because this year’s lead acting nominees are one of the most interconnected contender klatches to date. With a notable number of Oscar winners or nominees in the lead races (13), a strong showing among fringier talent (hello, Bob Odenkirk) and a record number of black performers nominated overall (18), Emmy’s pool is more diverse and more heavily stocked with former co-stars than ever before. From Transparent’s Jeffrey Tambor and Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss’ work in 1999’s Girl, Interrupted, to Veep’s Julia-Louis Dreyfus and House of Cards’ Kevin Spacey’s joint voiceover gig in 1998’s A Bug’s Life, to the prolific work of Olive Kitteridge’s Richard Jenkins, this chart outlines…

THE BEVERLY HILTON — a property boasting 569 rooms and a ballroom fit for 1,200 guests — has always been a major hub for Hollywood. Says Jack Gilardi (who has represented Charlton Heston and Shirley MacLaine in his 60 years at ICM Partners) of its exclusive L’Escoffier restaurant during the 1950s: “I remember walking in and seeing Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn; you’d see Sidney Poitier dressed to the tens.” Over the years, the hotel has been stalked not only by glamour but also by political infamy (Richard Nixon announced, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” at his last news conference there); scandal (John F. Kennedy was said to meet Marilyn Monroe in the Presidential Suite, while onetime owner Merv Griffin tried to ban prostitutes from the lobby…

► Cracking Animation 9 a.m. Aug. 9 A look at the past three decades of Aardman’s stopmotion animation with co-founder David Sproxton and cinematographer Dave Alex Riddett. ► The Renaissance of Virtual Reality: Are We Going to Do It Right This Time? 9 a.m. Aug. 10 Current developments in virtual reality are explored, along with past successes and failures. ► Industrial Light & Magic 40th Anniversary Presentation 2 p.m. Aug. 10 ILM’s nine-time Oscar-winning effects supervisor Dennis Muren discusses the company’s early days making Star Wars. ► Inside the Mind: The Making of Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out 2 p.m. Aug. 11 Members of the Pixar team, including effects supervisor Gary Bruins, discuss the making of their latest hit film.…

TCA AWARDS 7 P.M. AUG. 8 BEVERLY HILTON JAMES CORDEN HAS BECOME PRETTY USED to pressure after logging more than 60 viralfriendly episodes of his CBS late-night show since replacing Craig Ferguson in March. So he is ready to take the heat as emcee of the Television Critics Association Awards on Aug. 8 in Beverly Hills. Here, the British writer-actor-stage veteran, 36, reveals his (lack of) plans, his awards-show hosting heroes (paging Neil Patrick Harris!) and the TCA-nominated series he can’t stop watching. Are your hosting plans now firmly in place? Remember, this is a room full of TV critics. I haven’t thought about it yet. I have two children and an hour of TV to do every day — that’s my life. What gossip have you got for me?…