Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov-27-15 i The Hollywood Reporter

FAILURE IS A BLOOD SPORT IN Hollywood, consumed publicly and voraciously. Movies bomb, shows are canceled, executives are fired. The schadenfreude runs as thick as the rush hour traffic on the 405. And in 2010, along with the Nic Cage-starring The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Fox’s Lone Star, The Hollywood Reporter was among the town’s spectacular stories of failure. I moved here in July of that year to try to restart this place, newly acquired along with sister publications by deep-pocketed investors bullish on their potential. Me? I was tired and somewhat bored of living in NYC, where I’d moved when I was 17, as was my husband. For years, I’d had a nagging persistent fear of one day, as an elderly woman, regretting having never left Manhattan. I needed a…

IN 2009, WHEN I SOLD MY Shit My Dad Says Twitter feed to CBS, the most common response was, “They bought a Twitter feed? Hollywood is completely out of anything resembling an original idea.” (The second most common was, “Fuck you.” There was a random guy who just tweeted me “fuck you” every day for a year, the longest relationship I’ve had aside from my wife.) If I’m being honest, I would have agreed with all of the above if it hadn’t been my Twitter feed. Now that I’ve worked as a TV writer for six years, I’ve come to realize why networks were eager to buy my feed. Writers and broadcast networks have a specific relationship. Think of them as a middle-aged married couple who has sex once a…

BACK TO THE FUTURE: RETURN OF THE 124 SPIDER A star of the show will be Fiat Chrysler’s revival of the beloved Fiat 124 Spider sports car, kissing cousin of the Alfa Romeo Duetto Spider (driven by Dustin Hoffman in 1967’s The Graduate). The new Spider evokes the thoroughbred lines of the original — which has been out of production for 30 years but remains one of Italian coach builder Pininfarina’s most beautiful designs — mated to a 1.4-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine delivering 160 horsepower. The first 124 manufactured will be numbered Prima Edizione Lusso models with a commemorative badge, exclusive Azzurro Italia exterior paint and premium saddle leather seats. BMW 7 GETS A (BADLY NEEDED) REBOOT The 7 Series is a classic (Reese Witherspoon has been spotted driving an…

Five years ago, there was no House of Cards or Orange Is the New Black. Amazon was shipping products, not signing Woody Allen to make television. Nobody thought Jerry Seinfeld, creator and star of one of TV’s greatest series, would make a show for the Internet. Around that time, I was hired as THR’s chief television critic, and I would like to think that I knew big changes were coming to the industry — but maybe not this big. As we burst out of the Golden and into the Platinum Age of Television, the total number of series (and distribution platforms) soared, leaving audiences drunk on choice. It goes almost without saying that qualitatively, television is off the charts today — even with two of the best dramas, Mad Men…

AFTER MANY ATTEMPTS to bring Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle to TV, this alternate history, which imagines what America would look like had it lost World War II, has found a home at Amazon. The resulting 10-episode series is bold, intriguing and visually impressive. It’s 1962, 17 years after a U.S. defeat at the hands of Germany and Japan. Nazis control most of the Eastern United States (now called the Greater Nazi Reich), while Japan controls the West (now called the Japanese Pacific States). There is a lawless “neutral zone” slicing through the country along the Rocky Mountains. Americans are living under occupation. It’s a stark, interesting concept, and writer and executive producer Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files), pilot director David Semel and the team of…

BY THE TIME EXECUTIVES AT ABC DECIDED THAT IT SHOULD have a morning program, NBC’s Today show had been waking up America for more than 20 years. Good Morning America did not exactly get off to an auspicious start in November 1975. Many of ABC’s stations declined to carry this experiment out of the entertainment division, which had tapped an actor — David Hartman — to inform bleary-eyed viewers. (The show would later be reassigned to the news division.) But soon, GMA’s “conversational” approach, as Hartman puts it, won viewers over and the show mounted a challenge to Today, overtaking them for the first time in 1979 and fomenting the a.m. show wars that rage to this day. As GMA celebrates 40 years on TV, THR looks back at the…

OPENING NIGHT FOR THE FINAL HUNGER Games movie, Mockingjay — Part 2, was expected to be a major event in France, where the franchise has a rabid fan base. But after the terror attacks that rocked the city Nov. 13 and left 130 dead and hundreds injured, neither the sneak preview Nov. 17 nor opening-night screenings the following day sold out. “[The attacks] are in the back of my mind,” a patron purchasing three tickets at the Gaumont Opera theater told THR on Nov. 17. The man, who declined to give his name, says he debated walking the streets to the cinema before deciding that seeing the film would be a show of strength. “Call me crazy, I have to see it with friends,” he says. “If something were to…

AYEAR AFTER ALIBABA Group failed to acquire a 37 percent chunk of Lionsgate, the studio that opens The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 on Nov. 20 again finds itself the subject of rampant speculation that it will merge. This time, blame John Malone for getting Wall Street tongues wagging. The billionaire said Nov. 10 that Discovery Communications and Liberty Global, in which he owns stakes of 29 percent and 25 percent, respectively, each had purchased a 3.4 percent share of Lionsgate. Since Malone has a track record for incrementally building positions in companies until he controls them (recent example: Sirius XM Radio), it stands to reason he has his sights set on somehow acquiring Lionsgate, where he has been a board member since February. He signaled as much Nov.…

EVEN WITH FRAMED cartoons on his walls, Ed Catmull’s office on the Pixar Animation Studios campus in Emeryville, Calif., is bland compared to the museum of toy trains and memorabilia that is John Lasseter’s space down the hall. Catmull, a Utah-born pioneer in computer graphics who began his career at Lucasfilm before launching Pixar with Steve Jobs and Lasseter in 1986, often is described as the brains of the operation, while Lasseter is the heart. But Catmull disagrees: “First of all, John is extremely smart. And I think creativity happens when you combine the technical with the artistic.” That might be Pixar’s motto; the studio that popularized digital animation has released 15 films without a flop (its 16th, The Good Dinosaur, opens Nov. 25), grossing $9.3 billion in total box…

Five years after his daughter Gracie’s birth was announced on THR’s inaugural HHH page, John Loscalzo, CBS Local director of music and a 30-plus-year music industry veteran, died April 1, 2015, of a pulmonary embolism. He was 52. His wife of 23 years, Pandora director of artist and music industry communications Tracy Zamot, remembers him here. I’d been with John since I was 20 years old. He’d dated a friend of mine but they’d broken up, and I saw him at a show and he asked me for my number. He said he’d never forget the dirty look I gave him as I was writing it down. We were together for 26 years, but when Gracie was born, it was like we were 15, we were so giddy. We loved…

WHEN EIGHT OF THE world’s most accomplished performers gathered in one place on Nov. 14 for THR’s annual Actress Roundtable, you might have expected some backstage drama. Sure, there was a slight kerfuffle over whether their stylists should be allowed on-set, and then there was a major case of hunger pangs when new mom Carey Mulligan, 30, and newly-in-from-China Jennifer Lawrence, 25, both had to wolf down bananas before the shoot. But other than that, it was a lovefest as the two actresses joined Cate Blanchett (Carol, Truth), 46; Jane Fonda (Youth), 77; Brie Larson (Room), 26; Helen Mirren (Trumbo, Woman in Gold), 70; Charlotte Rampling (45 Years), 69; and Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs), 40, in a discussion that ranged from the pay gap between men and women to the…

CRACKLE ISN’T GOING FOR A “WE’RE better than TV” strut with its first original one-hour drama, The Art of More. The Sony-owned streaming service is the home of Joe Dirt 2, so their brand isn’t elitism — and indeed, The Art of More is closer in quality to a slightly below-average network show. Set against the backdrop of the high-stakes auction world, these 44-minute episodes feature no language, violence or sexual content that would seem out of place on CBS at 10 p.m. Our hero is Graham (Christian Cooke), a blue-collar Brooklyn kid now working as an account executive at a Park Avenue auction house. He also is a war veteran, having served in Iraq, where he became involved in smuggling ancient artifacts. Mentored by collector Arthur (Cary Elwes), Graham…

HER 2014 BEST-SELLER, The Monogram Murders, sold 500,000 copies. She’s got two film projects underway at Fox — including one to be directed by The Imitation Game’s Morten Tyldum — and a mini-series in development at Lifetime. Not to mention a new app launched this month. You’d never know Agatha Christie has been dead for nearly 40 years. Christie is just one of a slew of literary power players that aren’t letting a little thing like mortality get in the way of their income stream. Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, died in 2004, but in September his publisher, Knopf, came out with The Girl in the Spider’s Web, selling more than 200,000 hard covers and e-books in its first week (with a movie in…

HALLE BERRY & SIDNEY POITIER Photographed by Peggy Sirota on Dec. 10, 2010 “Poitier comes from an era where he’s just so gracious and willing — ‘Where do you want me, how do you want me?’ ” says Sirota, who shot this pairing for THR’s Legends Issue. Berry, meanwhile, “was just excited to be with him and experience the shoot. He comes in, they do their thing together, there’s an electricity between them and then he walks off set and everybody was like, ‘Wow! That was cool!’ ” OPRAH WINFREY Photographed by Joe Pugliese on Dec. 10, 2012 Pugliese was supposed to get only one hour, and the entire photo shoot for the Rule Breakers Issue was to take place in Oprah’s guesthouse. But then Oprah big-footed her publicist and…

LIKE MANY KIDS GROWING up during the Cold War, Steven Spielberg thought a lot about the end of the world. In fact, one day in the early 1960s — right around the time the Cuban Missile Crisis was pushing the planet to the brink of nuclear holocaust — Spielberg’s father came home and discovered that his 15-year-old son had drawn hypothetical blast radiuses on a map (to see if their house would be destroyed) and filled the bathtub with water (because he’d learned from the civil defense films at school that fresh drinking water would be scarce after an atomic attack). “It was in your face,” the now 68-year-old director tells THR of the apocalyptic fear that gripped America during the dark days of Mutual Assured Destruction. “It was on…

SYLVESTER STALLONE doesn’t get back in the ring in Creed, but he comes away a winner in this farfetched but likable offshoot of the Rocky series. The actor is more appealing playing the aging Rocky Balboa than he’s been since the beginning of his 40-year career. Essentially taking on the role of Burgess Meredith’s trainer character from the series’ early days, Stallone delightfully registers as a paisano from the old neighborhood, a man of the streets who’s lived his life, fought his battles and has no more scores to settle. From the points of view of director/co-writer Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan, this marks some major mainstreaming after their bracing 2013 indiebreakthrough Fruitvale Station. Dramatically, it’s the same old Rocky formula applied now to the hitherto unknown son…

ANYONE WHO SAW ROB REINER’S 1990 FILM of Stephen King’s Misery will recall the scene in which Kathy Bates “hobbles” James Caan with a sledgehammer. That means most of the audience for this stage adaptation is already wincing in anticipation well before the marvelous Laurie Metcalf, as psycho fan Annie Wilkes, coos her reassurance: “Darling, relax … I’m a trained nurse.” Gasps of horror and nervous laughter follow as she reduces the ankles of her favorite author to mush. Ouch. While some nifty theater tricks are employed to execute that grisly display of American Gothic, the production is mostly content to recycle, rather than reconceive, the material for a different medium. Thanks largely to the wacko humor of Metcalf ’s diabolically folksy performance and to the ingeniousness of David Korins’…