Innholdsfortegnelse for Wednesday February 7 2018 i The Hollywood Reporter

DIRECTOR Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water The Golden Globe and Producers Guild of America winner added the DGA’s top award to his mantelpiece Feb. 3. Only seven times in 69 years has the top DGA Award winner not gone on to win the best director Oscar. Jordan Peele, Get Out He may have lost the DGA Award for film directing to Guillermo del Toro, but he remains in play after scoring the next best thing — the DGA’s prize for feature directorial debut — and earning a standing ovation at the ceremony as he headed to the stage. ACTOR Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour The prohibitive frontrunner to win the Oscar — his portrayal of Winston Churchill has earned Globe and SAG awards — was feted at the Santa…

Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (RANDOM HOUSE, FEB. 6) BY Kate Bowler AGENCY Gotham Group The Duke Divinity School professor chronicles her stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis at age 35 and how it upended her beliefs. Her Jan. 26 New York Times op-ed furthered the conversation. Lone Stars PHILOMEL BOOKS, SEPT. 12, 2017) BY Mike Lupica AGENCY ICM Partners Shopped as Friday Night Lights meets Concussion, this YA novel from the best-selling sports columnist follows a middle schooler who suspects his beloved football coach, a former pro player, is suffering from CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy).…

“‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’” UMA THURMAN The actress, revealing to The New York Times what Quentin Tarantino told her on the set of Kill Bill before a dangerous driving stunt led to a violent crash. “I was offered the role of Poop; I was like, ‘That’s fucked up.’” JORDAN PEELE The Get Out director, revealing at the DGA Awards that The Emoji Movie helped convince him to retire from acting. “100% less Trump.” MACAULAY CULKIN The grown-up child star, revealing on Reddit why he preferred the first Home Alone movie over the sequel, which featured a cameo by the president. “How you gonna call me, but Oprah ain’t called me? Isn’t Oprah your friend?”…

Paparazzi long have built lucrative careers on capturing candids of Hollywood stars, but now they’re exploring a new source of revenue: suing those same stars for posting their pics on social media without permission. Khloe Kardashian, Jessica Simpson and Gigi Hadid have each recently been sued for copyright infringement after paparazzi photos of themselves were shared on their official social media accounts. On Feb. 1, NFL star Odell Beckham Jr. sued Splash News for extortion after reportedly receiving a $40,000 demand for sharing an image of himself on Instagram. Typically, paparazzi pics can easily be licensed for a couple of hundred bucks a pop. But if a star sees a photo online and shares it without permission, the move could lead to six-figure damages if it was willful. “These lawsuits…

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The five nominees for animated feature have a slew of memorable characters, and, it turns out, many are female. They range from a brave 11-year-old girl living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan to an intimidating Mexican great-great-grandmother and a bossy therapy goat. When it came to creating this band of colorful characters, the filmmakers had to decide how they would look (including expressive eyes and lovable underbites), dress (such as a buttoned-up mom and a matriarch with an affinity for Victorian-era clothing) and sound (thanks to voice cameos by an Oscar-nominated actress and a Saturday Night Live comedy queen). Creators reveal how they built these characters from the blank page up. I ’m here to calm you now so you can maim and gore things later,” Lupe the Calming Goat…

WAYNE WAPEEMUKWA Wapeemukwa, 27, won the best Canadian first feature prize at the 2017 Toronto film fest with his debut, Luk’Luk’I. “Walking away from TIFF with the best first feature prize confirmed for my cast, crew and me that we were on the right track,” he says. SADAF FOROUGHI Born in Iran, Foroughi, 41, studied in France and settled in Montreal before writing and directing Ava, a coming-of-age drama that won the FIPRESCI critics prize at Toronto in 2017. SHELAGH MCLEOD After establishing a career as an actress on U.K. TV, McLeod, 57, recently wrapped production on her debut feature, the Richard Dreyfuss- and Colm Feore-starring thriller Astronaut, shot just north of Toronto. JACKIE ENGLISH After a string of acting credits, including CBS’ Beauty and the Beast, English broke into…

David Benioff & D.B. Weiss The Game of Thrones creators jump to light speed with Lucasfilm to write and produce new Star Wars films (separate from the Rian Johnson trilogy). Charles Harder The litigator for Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and Hulk Hogan sees partner Douglas Mirell quit, saying he was “uncomfortable” with the firm’s client list. Dana Walden & Gary Newman The Fox TV co-CEOs preside over a robust launch for Ryan Murphy’s 911 and see the broadcaster hit No. 1 for the first month of 2018 — before the Super Bowl put NBC back on top. Vincent Cirrincione The producer and manager of Halle Berry and Taraji P. Henson shutters his company after nine claims of sexual harassment are reported by The Washington Post. Showbiz Stocks $220.88 (+2.9%) THE…

Video will embrace the radio star this summer as 64-year-old Howard Stern will become a multimedia play for SiriusXM. In plans outlined during a Jan. 30 earnings call, CEO Jim Meyer cautioned that “we are not going into the Netflix business” but will be “wading into the video pool” before July. The satellite radio provider will draw on 30 years of Stern interviews as a blueprint to launch video of other talk hosts, comedians and musicians. The video product will be part of SiriusXM All Access, which at $20.99 a month is about a $5 premium to the regular service. “Management isn’t planning to launch the video product as a separate package but expects it to drive higher take rates of the All Access package,” says Evercore ISI analyst Vijay…

HOW PARAMOUNT AND NETFLIX PULLED OFF THAT CLOVERFIELD SUPER BOWL JUKE Deal of the Week Super Bowl viewers were shocked when Netflix dropped an ad for The Cloverfield Paradox, revealing that the J.J. Abrams-produced movie heretofore known as God Particle would forgo a theatrical release and instead debut on the streaming service immediately following the big game Feb. 4. The marketing stunt capped a rescue plan hatched by Abrams, Paramount chairman-CEO Jim Gianopulos, Netflix chief Ted Sarandos and head of original films Scott Stuber, among others. Worried that Paradox would perish at the box office — it was set to hit theaters April 20 after several delays — Paramount and Abrams handed it to Netflix, which is willing to shell out big bucks for high-profile content. Sources say the deal,…

People, Places, Preoccupations “One of the big conversations I’m trying to have onstage right now is that to be pro-woman, you don’t have to be anti-man. Saying all men suck makes you look like an idiot,” says Cummings, photographed Jan. 26 at Harlowe in West Hollywood. Whitney Cummings was right around 30 when her mother and father suffered strokes within two years of each other. Desperate to understand what went wrong, she began devouring neurology books, which led her to Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain. While it would do little to aid her parents, the book profoundly changed the comedian’s understanding of herself. “I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of relief,” she says, “and a lot less crazy.” Now Cummings, 35 and a prolific TV creator (2 Broke Girls, Whitney),…

The death of Glee star Mark Salling — which came ahead of a March 7 sentencing date for pleading guilty Sept. 29 to keeping a vast trove of child pornography — will go down as one of the darkest downfalls in Hollywood history. Salling, who for six seasons played the bully turned glee club member Puck on the Fox show, was expected to get between four and seven years for his crimes, discovered after a December 2015 raid on his Sunland home recovered more than 50,000 digital photos and videos depicting child rape, some of the victims as young as 3. Salling also was to to pay $50,000 in restitution to any victim who came forward. (Now a lawsuit might be required to get a piece of Salling’s $1.91 million…

The Oscars won’t just determine the future of individual winners and losers this year. They could also have a real impact on the future of specialty-film distributors. After stealing the luster from studios when it comes to the awards, they’re now fighting for their lives in a radically changing media landscape, with streaming giants Netflix and Amazon threatening to gobble up the talent they’ve relied on to make a splash in awards season. Such studio subsidiaries as Fox Searchlight, Universal’s Focus Features and Sony Pictures Classics were set up in the 1990s with three goals: (1) develop the kind of filmmakers who could then be assigned bigger-budget films; (2) win back some of the box-office gold that had been siphoned away by indie challengers like Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Films, which…

“He’s not a movie star,” says director Oliver Stone of Dafoe, who was photographed Feb. 2 at Siren Orange in Los Angeles. “He hasn’t fallen into the movie star trap. That’s why he’s still working.” Here is a typical day in the life of Willem Dafoe: He wakes up early, usually around 5 or 6. He meditates, has a cup of coffee and writes in his journal for a while. Then he checks his email, does some yoga and makes breakfast. If he’s prepping for a film, which he almost always is, he’ll go over his lines for a couple of hours. If he’s not, he’ll read a book, take a walk around his West Village neighborhood or — his favorite activity of all — do some laundry. “It’s one…

When it comes to making a European debut, director Gus Van Sant has experienced the highs, taking home the Palme d’Or at Cannes for the Columbineesque school massacre drama Elephant in 2003. And then there were the lows, like 2015’s Sea of Trees unveiling at Cannes, where it was savaged by critics. Based on the Sundance reaction to his latest, the Joaquin Phoenix starrer Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, the 65-year-old filmmaker should receive a warm reception when the movie screens in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. The Amazon Studios title, which centers on a paraplegic cartoonist struggling with sobriety, is based on John Callahan’s memoir. The two-time Oscar nominee spoke to THR from his home in Palm Springs about his film and his relationship with the…

Dieter Kosslick, with his black fedora and bright red scarf, has been the enduring symbol of the Berlin International Film Festival for the 17 years he has served as festival director. But with his contract up in May 2019, he only has two festivals left — including the one that kicks off Feb. 15. And already a battle has erupted over his legacy and what comes next. In late November, 79 directors — including art house stars Fatih Akin (In the Fade), Maren Ade (Toni Erdmann) and Oscar winner Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum) signed an open letter calling for a post- Kosslick transformation. When he steps down, the directors wrote, the Berlinale should “refresh and renew” the festival and think about its “fundamental direction.” Innocuous enough. But the letter,…

Ihad left Disney after nearly 40 years there, and since then I had been focusing on personal, expressive films. Kobe had seen this film I did for Google, Duet, and he contacted one of the executive producers, and she set up a meeting. He came in to our tiny studio in West Hollywood, which is just in a duplex, and it was so surreal. He drives up in a big black Suburban, and he is just in our neighborhood. Kobe Bryant! Kobe loves animation; he is an animation geek. So he walked in and was standing in our little dining room — but it is actually our story room — and he looked around at the drawings and storyboards and little things on the wall, and I’m thinking, “Oh boy,…

King Kong. The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum. Avatar’s Neytiri. The Planet of the Apes’ Caesar. These are just some of the iconic digitally created characters that have been brought to the screen with the help of Joe Letteri, four-time Oscar winner, Weta Digital’s senior VFX supervisor and 2018’s recipient of the Visual Effects Society’s Georges Melies Award. In fact, it was the opportunity to play a role in creating the tragic Gollum that brought Letteri, 60, to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. He had worked as a CG artist on 1993’s Jurassic Park, where, he explains, “I became interested in what made something like a dinosaur look realistic — some of that was the detail that you see in the dinosaur skin. I also started learning about…

With Stephen Fry having given up his hosting duties after a record 12 editions, BAFTA has turned to arguably an even bigger British national treasure for its latest awards ceremony: Joanna Lumley, who will be taking the reins Feb. 18 at London’s famed Royal Albert Hall. Ahead of the biggest film awards outside the U.S., Lumley explains why she won’t be making any political gags, how the British equivalent of #MeToo might look on the night and whether her most famous onscreen character — Absolutely Fabulous’ champers-guzzling Patsy — will be making an appearance. Do you have any nerves about stepping into Stephen Fry’s welltrodden BAFTA shoes? Stephen is a huge friend of mine. I shall do my level best to fit into those huge shoes. He’s such a consummate,…

DUSTIN LANCE BLACK The Valentine Davies Award will recognize the Milk writer’s work for the LGBTQ community. JAMES L. BROOKS The Mary Tyler Moore Show co-creator gets the Laurel Award for screenwriting. ALISON CROSS The Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award goes to the writer-producer (Roe vs. Wade, Murder in the First). LEN WEIN The late comic book icon, co-creator of Wolverine, will be honored with the Animation Writing Award.…

Will Sony’s incoming CEO finally cut the cord on Hollywood? On Feb. 1, the conglomerate said top exec Kaz Hirai, 57, would hand over the reins to CFO Kenichiro Yoshida, 58, on April 1. The move ignited new speculation that Sony’s entertainment assets could end up auctioned. Hirai has been a passionate advocate for Sony Pictures Entertainment, while Yoshida, a veteran of corporate strategy who joined Sony in 1983, not as much. But despite Yoshida’s reputation for paring underperforming units, many Sony watchers say he’s unlikely to unload SPE right away. “I credit [Yoshida] with a big part of the turnaround of the past few years,” says Eric Jackson of EMJ Capital, which owns Sony stock. “He’s forced transparency on the different business units.” Yoshida and Hirai led Sony from…

Big Deal Amid the looming departure of Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines, HGTV is not risking losing any more top-tier talent. Cable’s fifth-most-watched network has inked a multiyear extension with Property Brothers’ Drew and Jonathan Scott (CAA, Canada’s Stohn Hay), who first came to the Scripps Interactive-owned network in 2011. The twins, 39, are responsible for an atypical share of HGTV output: the original Property Brothers, the spinoffs Buying & Selling and At Home and the competition series Brother vs. Brother — which, with a reach of 13 million cross-platform viewers per episode, is Scott Brothers Entertainment’s top series. “They can produce and star in an incredible amount of content in a very short period of time,” says Scripps U.S. programming GM Allison Page. “It’s a scale we…

Sherry Lansing held court at Mr Chow. Ben Harper sat with WME agent Will Ward. … James Franco, Harry Styles, Jeremy Piven and Dev Patel were at Croft Alley. … Henry Winkler and wife Stacey had lunch with Terry Bradshaw at Farmshop. Director Bryan Gordon was nearby. … Ben Affleck lunched at Tavern. … Over at Bottega Louie, Helen Hunt broke bread with Jodi Foster. … Malcolm Gladwell sat at Brentwood Country Mart’s Caffe Luxxe. … Keanu Reeves stopped by Polo Lounge. … Christian Bale was at Tallula’s with Hostiles director Scott Cooper. Shawn Levy sat nearby. The NoMad Mezzanine The Quick Pitch Daniel Humm and Will Guidara (of NYC’s designated “World’s Best Restaurant” Eleven Madison Park) are responsible for the dining options at the new NoMad Hotel. Try the…

When it comes to superhero movies, visual effects don’t always get a lot of respect. The last time one of these films won a VFX Oscar was in 2004, for Spider-Man 2. And this year, only one superhero movie, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, fielded a VFX team that earned a ticket to the Dolby Theatre. They’re hoping to beat the odds thanks to the film’s complex effects created by a dozen vendors. The degree of difficulty they embraced is evident in the movie’s final battle, which pits the Guardians against Ego, a “Living Planet” that also takes the human form of actor Kurt Russell. The sequence’s visuals, with Weta serving as lead VFX house, were inspired by the comics, and the unique visual style was created with…

Lenny Dykstra, the ex-con and former major league center fielder, relishes his wild man reputation, and relishes running his mouth about it even more. With roughly Pete Rose’s chance of making it to Cooperstown, he’ll talk about gobbling Human Growth Hormone with his cereal during his playing days just as easily as he’ll open up about how, in his mid-50s, he’s developed a post-prison side gig as a silverhaired gigolo to Beverly Hills grandmothers. But over lunch in a corner booth at The Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge, it’s another wild man, more famous and even more hard living, once his best buddy but with whom he no longer speaks, who has him gabbing. Dykstra explains that he believes his onetime friend Charlie Sheen is on the verge of being…

DEKALB ELEMENTARY Inspired by a real 911 call during a school shooting in Atlanta, the film follows a man who enters an elementary school with a semiautomatic rifle. THE ELEVEN O’CLOCK This Australian short is set during a session between a psychiatrist and a patient (who is convinced he is the doctor). MY NEPHEW EMMETT A 64-year-old African-American man tries to protect his 14-year-old nephew, Emmett Till, from two white men who invade his home. THE SILENT CHILD A deaf 4-year-old, isolated from the world and her hearing family, is taught sign language by a caring social worker. WATU WOTE: ALL OF US The Kenya-set tale follows bus passengers who are attacked by a terrorist group demanding the Muslim passengers identify the Christian onboard.…

At the 2017 BAFTA Awards, the outstanding British film honor went to Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, a gritty human tale about a carpenter from the north of England and his nearexcruciating struggle to navigate the U.K.’s bureaucratic benefits system after having a heart attack. In other words, extremely British. This year, among a crop of equally British titles sits a rather unusual entry. The nomination of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, despite director Martin McDonagh’s burgundy British passport, has caused a little confusion in the U.S. Not only is the film’s main cast almost exclusively American, but it also was shot in North Carolina, is based on a real-life American story and even includes the words “Ebbing, Missouri” right there in the title. How, exactly, is this film British?…