Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov-20-15 i The Hollywood Reporter

2013 2014 TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO, IN 1992, The Hollywood Reporter created its Women in Entertainment Power 100 list, an annual index of the most powerful women in Hollywood. At the time, Sherry Lansing had just been named chairman of Paramount Pictures in a history-making move, and the mood in town was as optimistic as an earlier era’s Virginia Slims cigarette ad — “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Fast-forward to today. I’m a female editor covering an industry that, in terms of gender, remains persistently stuck, not unlike the frozen-in-amber faces one sees strolling Rodeo Drive. It’s like white noise at this point, all those facts that bubble up with the same redundancy as the remakes and franchise sequels Hollywood now loves. Two decades since Lansing’s news, the executive suites…

KA-CHING! WHO’S INKING ON THE DOTTED LINE THIS WEEK ACTIVISION’S STUDIO: WILL GAMES MAKE MOVIE FRANCHISES? THE NEW MISSION for Call of Duty? Dominate the box office. Publisher Activision Blizzard disclosed Nov. 6 the launch of a studio to create movies and television shows based on its video game properties. An animated series adapted from kids franchise Skylanders already is in production with Justin Long, Ashley Tisdale, Jonathan Banks and Norm Macdonald lending voices. But the real test will be adapting the best-selling Call of Duty world into what new studio head Nick van Dyk calls “a cinematic universe,” with a film bowing as early as 2018. Moviegoers and critics largely have been unkind to game adaptations, with 1993’s Super Mario Bros. and 2005’s Dwayne Johnson starrer Doom among the…

“I, a plus sized, dark-skinned woman, had a love scene on primetime television.” GABOUREY SIDIBE The actress, responding in a blog post to online ridicule over her Empire sex scene. “It’s not that you hate any of them individually, but it’s just that everything they stand for is against everything I stand for.” REBEL WILSON The Pitch Perfect 2 star, on why she refused to present an award with Kendall and Kylie Jenner at the MTV Video Music Awards. “Whoever that last speaker was, you were condescending to us actors. I don’t give a f—k who you are.” ROBERT DE NIRO Star of The Intern, to Flickr and Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield at The Wall Street Journal’s Innovator Awards. Minutes earlier, Butterfield remarked on the “supermodels and movie stars” in…

THE YEAR WAS 2002. THE front-runner for best actor was Russell Crowe. Crowe had delivered the performance of his life in A Beautiful Mind and was poised to win an Oscar — until something went dreadfully wrong. After receiving a BAFTA Award, where he made the tactical but not terminal misstep of reciting a poem in full (“I am celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo”), Crowe lost his cool when the BBC excised the poem from its broadcast. Tracking down the show’s director, the actor pinned him to a wall and unleashed a volley of expletives, describing him as a c— and a motherf—er. Four weeks later, he lost the Academy Award to Training Day’s Denzel Washington. That’s about the only time…

The Revenant was very ambitious, how it was filmed in all natural light and with more than 90 percent being shot in exterior, real locations. The big nemesis we encountered was the weather. We faced completely unusual and unpredictable weather patterns. Before experiencing it firsthand, I didn’t know what a chinook, a warming wind that quickly melts and evaporates snow away, was. We would come to work and have beautiful snow, and then you’d go in the trailer and come out an hour later to completely dry ground. It was shocking. It was as though someone came and sucked up everything with a vacuum cleaner. We were shooting in Calgary, and March, which is traditionally their heaviest month of snow, was suddenly just the opposite. In addition to multiple weather…

ON THE AFTERNOON of Nov. 4, Catherine Hardwicke trekked to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, laptop in tow, to offer testimony for a federal investigation into the lack of female film and television directors. The Twilight and Thirteen helmer had not received a letter from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as about 50 women have this year. She appeared voluntarily. “When I read about it, I reached out because I want to be involved in the change,” explains Hardwicke. “This is a historic moment, and we cannot let this slip away. We’ve got to inspire people to be on the right side of history, to make a change.” Despite spending about three hours with federal investigators, during which she described in detail how she lost…

IN A YEAR WITHOUT A CLEAR FRONTRUNNER, the distributors of an unusually big number of films feel that awards recognition is within their reach — and they aren’t leaving anything on the table when it comes to promotional opportunities. Already this season, the pre-Thanksgiving flurry of Q&As, lunches, dinners and cocktail parties has hit a fever pitch. Among the hotter invites: a screening of the doc short The Tuskegee Airmen: Sacrifice and Triumph at the home of Lionel Richie on Oct. 5; a party for Brett Morgen’s doc feature Cobain: Montage of Heck at Robert Evans’ home Nov. 5; and a hangout at Adam Levine’s house for The End of the Tour’s Jason Segel on Nov. 8. The list goes on. But campaigning is reaching a crescendo around the Academy’s…

The Travelers (Crown) BY Chris Pavone REP RWSG Pavone’s debut, 2012’s The Expats, picked up a slew of literary awards and was bought by CBS Films. His March 2016 follow-up sees a dissolute 30-something travel writer caught up in global espionage. Pitched with the tag: “It’s 3 a.m. Your husband has just become a spy.” “How Do You Sell the Last Two Burial Plots in Manhattan?” (New York) BY Mara Altman REPS CAA, Beam Management The magazine’s darkly comedic look at the ultimate real estate story, featuring colorful characters selling the city’s last in-ground plots for a cool $350,000 each (as one seller puts it, “The perfect gift for a hedge-fund billionaire to give his sweetheart”).…

FEW WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT A stylist could launch a Hollywood mini-empire. But Brooke Wall did when she started an agency in 1999 with a vision to bring behindthe-scenes beauty players into the limelight. Her Wall Group — which represents 56 stylists, including brand names Kate Young (Natalie Portman, Sienna Miller) and Lori Goldstein (Rihanna, Katy Perry), along with makeup artists, hairdressers, production designers and manicurists — was acquired in July by WMEIMG for an undisclosed sum. (Stylist salaries vary, but fees for red-carpet looks range from $250 for $5,000, and top beauty experts can score lucrative ambassador deals.) The entertainment, sports and fashion behemoth already is providing synergistic opportunities for Wall, thanks to such clients as Emma Stone, Matt Damon, Rihanna and Justin Timberlake. Born in Vancouver, Wall, 51,…

CHARLIE BROWN — WITH HIS bulbous head and wisp of a forelock — has one of the most recognizable mugs in pop culture. But giving him a big 3D computer-animated close-up posed a unique challenge for Steve Martino, director of The Peanuts Movie, which cost Fox and Blue Sky Studios slightly less than $100 million to produce and grossed $45 million during its opening weekend. Martino, who kept reminding himself, “Don’t screw it up,” compares Charles M. Schulz’s Snoopy to a Picasso: “The silhouette of his head doesn’t change from front and side. But from the side, if he’s looking to the left, the nose would be on the tip of his face and there would be one eye. But when Snoopy looks to camera, Schulz keeps the same silhouette…

Making Spotlight was a true joy for all of the producers, in spite of the many obstacles that were thrown at us in the eight years since the project was conceived. But getting [director] Tom McCarthy his shoot days in Boston — now that was something. We had to schedule the bulk of the production for Toronto to make our numbers work — and Tom was adamant that we shoot all of our exteriors in Boston — so, initially, we planned for four shoot days in Boston. We started there, shot our first night at Fenway during a live game and got some beautiful stuff. But, as fine filmmakers oft do, Tom wanted more. We didn’t have the money, but we went again — on a weekend — and we…

Overall, Black Mass was a pretty smooth shoot because [director] Scott Cooper was so well prepared and the crew was so on top of everything. However, we ran into a small issue with one of our younger castmembers. We cast this really great kid, Luke Ryan, because in the audition, he was cute, charismatic and delivered a completely natural performance. However, when we got to set, it was clear he had been working closely with an acting coach. When he delivered his lines, they felt very rehearsed. We had to politely ask the acting coach to leave, and then we reworked the script so that our young actor could have fresh lines to work with. In the end, we got the authentic performance we cast him for and were very…

Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short centers on a monumental global event that continues to reverberate today. And, as in Michael’s other work, it poses a troubling question: What do the experts really know? Do they know anything? Because this particular story takes place in the world of bond markets, filled with complicated financial instruments, we had the challenge of making the story comprehensible onscreen, so that the huge, probing ideas of the book would register with an audience. Adam McKay and Charles Randolph made some brilliant choices in their script to make this a film that anyone can understand — and, to go a step further, a film that makes us aware of how so-called experts can utilize fancy terminology for their own ends. Kleiner is a producer of…

BEST PICTURE Brooklyn This 1950s-set bicontinental tearjerker, starring Saoirse Ronan, got an enthusiastic reaction at its Nov. 8 Academy screening — and it has scored the biggest opening in Ireland for an Irish film in 19 years. By the Sea Angelina Jolie Pitt’s directorial follow-up to Unbroken, starring her and hubby Brad, proved a meandering attempt at a European art film when it opened AFI Fest on Nov. 5 and landed with a thud. BEST DIRECTOR SARAH GAVRON Suffragette The British Independent Film Awards gave her historical drama an impressive four acting noms, including one for Carey Mulligan, but bizarrely snubbed the U.K.-born director. TOM MCCARTHY Spotlight On Nov. 3, he premiered his movie in Hollywood; on Nov. 6, it opened to nearly $300,000 from only five theaters; on Nov.…

RIHANNA IS GETTING HER ARI EMANUEL ON. The WME-repped pop diva quietly has founded a beauty and stylist agency called Fr8me with managing partner Benoit Demouy, formerly of the agency Tracey Mattingly. The Los Angeles-based firm assists artists in booking commercials, editorial shoots, ad campaigns and redcarpet gigs. “Hair, makeup and styling play an important role in creativity,” Rihanna, 27, tells THR. “I am very involved with that part of my process, so this agency was an organic thing for me to do.” Talent already on board: Rihanna’s longtime makeup artist Mylah Morales, Taraji P. Henson’s wardrobe stylist Jason Bolden and hairstylists Patricia Morales (Evan Rachel Wood, Fergie) and Marcia Hamilton (Jada Pinkett Smith and the Smith family). “We are lucky enough to have some of the best artists at…

By Chris Gardner and Tatiana Siegel Sorkin’s Very Strange Electromagnetic Ways Aaron Sorkin may have more magical powers than even his most die-hard fans ever imagined. The super-scribe was taking part in THR’s annual Writers Roundtable at Siren Studios in West Hollywood when the lights suddenly went out, surprising everyone except the Oscar-winning writer of Steve Jobs, who revealed he has the power to burn out streetlamps simply by walking past them. “I thought this was a crazy coincidence — that I happened to be walking past streetlamps at the very moment that the bulb is done,” he said at the Nov. 2 taping. “There’s a name for this. It’s a real thing.” It’s called “Street Light Interference,” and there are scads of websites devoted to the subject of this…

1 Faena in the Luhrmann- and Martin-designed living room of a model room in the hotel. 2 The Faena District’s coat of arms was created by Antwerp-based firm Studio Job, which also designed the district’s cathedral rug with Faena symbology. 3 From left: Luhrmann, Faena and Blavatnik in New York. Says Luhrmann: “What Alan Faena, Ximena Caminos and their team are doing is unique, brave and unlike anything attempted before in Miami.” 4 The oceanfront view of Faena Hotel. IN 2013, FAENA HOTEL MIAMI BEACH WAS BEHIND SCHEDULE and needed direction. Alan Faena, the 51-year-old white-clad Argentine hotelier and real estate developer, his wife, Ximena Caminos, and his business partner, Ukrainian financier Len Blavatnik, were in France for the Cannes Film Festival. The Great Gatsby had just screened, and Blavatnik…

HALLOWEEN IS OVER, BUT MASKS (OF the prestige skin-care variety) still are scaring up big sales — up 60 percent in the U.S. since 2013 — knocking moisturizers out of the top slot. “Facial masks have been the driving force behind skincare growth for the past year and remain strong for the coming season,” says Kelly St. John, vp divisional merchandise manager at Neiman Marcus. Global market research firm NPD Group reports masks made $65.5 million in 12 months in the U.S., and sales jumped 127 percent in one year for Amorepacific Corp., the largest cosmetic company in South Korea, whose market has been driving global skin-care trends for the past five years. U.S. and European brands have swiftly masked up: Dermatologist David Colbert just launched Illumino Anti-Aging Brightening mask,…

The Danish Girl is a period drama and love story about a wife who helps her husband become her authentic self — a woman. When I optioned the book in early 2000, the industry had entered a time when the word “period” alone was enough to put a nail in the project’s coffin with financiers. But it didn’t stop there: The subject of transgender was enough to empty any room in which the story was pitched. It took another seven years before I had a script by the wonderful Lucinda Coxon, two major actors and a director — but still no financier. By then I was extremely fortunate to have been joined by two dedicated producers, Anne Harrison (who had largely paid for the screenplay) and Linda Reisman. In 2008…

Initially, building the ‘Room’ part of Room seemed to be a fairly straightforward prospect. But from the moment director Lenny Abrahamson and I started to talk about it with our production designer Ethan Tobman, it evolved into something much more complex, storied and ingenious. First of all, we built a Styrofoam dummy set to experiment with different dimensions and, along with our cinematographer Danny Cohen, concluded that anything more than the 10 feet by 10 feet specified by writer Emma Donoghue would take something essential from the story. We also decided that the camera lens would never sit outside the walls of the room and designed the set as a series of small, quickly removable panels in the walls, floor and roof, which meant we did not need to float…