Innholdsfortegnelse for Emmy Special Issue 19A May 2018 i The Hollywood Reporter

Black Mir ror’s #MeToo Moment The script for the “USS Callister” episode of Netflix’s creepy sci-fi series Black Mirror was conceived long before the Harvey Weinstein bombshells and the subsequent #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, but the episode felt especially timely when it aired with the rest of the six-episode fourth season in December. Following tech genius Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), who creates his own Star Trek-esque universe within an online game where he controls and abuses digital clones of his co-workers, the episode hit Netflix two months into the workplace harassment reckoning. “It kind of contextualized [the episode] in a way that was completely unexpected,” says director Toby Haynes. “It just brought new meaning to it. You’re watching it going, ‘Crikey, this is really touching on something here.’” Still,…

In 2017, television finally caught up with 78-year-old Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood and her work’s feminist themes and dark undercurrents. Atwood was front and center as Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale dominated the Emmys. Sarah Polley and Mary Harron’s adaptation of her historical novel Alias Grace premiered to acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival and on Netflix. She even had a children’s show, Wandering Wenda, on CBC Television. Atwood spoke to THR about why 2017 was such a special year, Alias Grace lead Sarah Gadon and how Handmaid’s Tale has “escaped from the covers” of the book. What did it feel like to receive that standing ovation at the Emmys? We didn’t know it was coming, of course. I had a coach who’s another Canadian. She plays a Martha…

After nearly three decades of making films on a spectrum of subjects — ballet, wrestling, drugs — in the past few years, Darren Aronofsky has settled on a common theme: the environment. In 2017, the helmer released the divisive environmental allegory mother! and enlisted Patti Smith and Jessica Chastain to narrate a VR experience about the cosmos, Spheres. His latest effort to get viewers to preserve the planet, One Strange Rock, is a National Geographic Channel informational series about the complex, interlocking systems that keep Earth running. Aronofsky and production company Protozoa Pictures worked with British documentary producers Nutopia to film for 100 weeks in 45 countries and combine an array of branches of science into one narrative. As executive producer, Aronofsky helped brainstorm using astronauts and their insights about…

Since Wild Wild Country’s March debut, the gripping documentary series has become the latest unscripted phenomenon from Netflix. Executive produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, the series is the work of another set of filmmaking brothers, Chapman and Maclain Way, who made the 2014 documentary The Battered Bastards of Baseball for the platform. Over the course of six episodes, Wild Wild Country follows controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho), his onetime personal assistant Ma Anand Sheela and the “free love” cult they led in 1980s Oregon. The Way brothers spoke with THR about the genesis of the series, the one former cult member they couldn’t get to talk and how they feel about a potential fictionalized retelling of the wild, wild story. How did the idea for the show…

Four months after dozens of women came forward to share their stories of sexual harassment and assault at the hands of Harvey Weinstein — the beginning of a Hollywood-wide reckoning — Jennifer Fox found herself onstage at the Eccles Theater during the Sundance Film Festival, about to tell her own sexual-abuse story with her 114-minute movie. The Tale is a cinematic memoir based on Fox’s life, following a journalist who discovers a story she wrote for a childhood English class about what she believed was a consensual, “special” relationship between her 13-year-old self and her adult track coach. The movie volleys back and forth between the teen Jenny (Isabelle Nelisse) and the adult Jennifer (Laura Dern), who must contend with the much more disturbing reality of the relationship. “People are…

In recent years, true crime and real-life events have seen a resurgence on scripted television. And while it’s often said that truth is stranger than fiction, turning fact into compelling drama comes with its own challenges. “Reality is messy,” says Rene Balcer, veteran producer of Law & Order, who this year spun the franchise that often rips cases straight from the headlines off into the NBC limited series True Crime: The Menendez Murders. “While a true-life story can offer the writer an abundance of ready-made riches, if you get into narrative trouble you can’t just have Vin Diesel drive his car through your front window and save the day. And while it’s true that reality often strains credulity, the fact that something actually happened is no defense if it strikes…

Laura Dern, who stars in the HBO TV film The Tale, which made a #MeToo splash at Sundance, had a big year in the Emmy movie race in 2008. Recount won its category, and Dern received a nomination for supporting actress and won at the Golden Globes. The HBO drama focuses on the Florida recount after the 2000 presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Sydney Pollock had been set to direct, but illness forced him to drop out. The film premiered the day before he died from cancer May 26, 2008. “After Sydney, we went in a completely different direction with Jay Roach,” says then-HBO Films president Colin Callender. “He comes from a more comedic background, and he brought a wryness and an irreverence to the screen.”…

After earning an Emmy nomination for last year’s Bernie Madoff biopic The Wizard of Lies, director Barry Levinson returns to HBO with another film based on true events, Paterno. Starring Al Pacino as the famed Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, the TV movie centers on the last few weeks of his life, when a sexualabuse scandal around assistant coach Jerry Sandusky rocked the university and the football program. Levinson opened up to THR about bringing the sensitive story to the screen, working with Pacino and that Anthony Scaramucci executive producer credit. Paterno obviously had a very big presence in education and college football outside of the Sandusky trial. Was the plan for this film always to focus on just the end of his life and the scandal? Yes, because…

Scott Frank spent years trying to make Godless — a Western that follows a town full of women (widowed when a mine collapsed) who find their homes threatened after the arrival of an injured outlaw — as a movie. It finally came to fruition as a seven-part Netflix series, starring Jack O’Connell, Michelle Dockery and Jeff Daniels. Frank, 58, spoke to THR about his starstudded cast and their horse-riding abilities. How did this project end up as a limited series? I wrote it in 2004 as a film and tried to get it made forever. Westerns just were not in fashion and they didn’t do well overseas in particular, which was a key part of the decision. Steven Soderbergh had just done Behind the Candelabra on HBO and said, “It’s…

Alias Grace (Netflix) SARAH POLLEY, WRITER Novel by Margaret Atwood FIRST IMPRESSIONS I first read the book when I was 17 years old, and I remember little else of that year besides the transformative experience of reading that book, over and over again. It reached deep into me, in a way I’m not sure I completely understood at the time. It addressed things that were hidden from me, but pertinent to my life: the splitting off that can happen in a personality when someone has been harassed or assaulted or has come of age in a world where women are prey, the ephemeral nature of memory and the idea that we’re all unreliable narrators. WHAT WAS KEPT FROM THE BOOK It was extremely important to me to keep the immigration from…

TICKLING GIANTS Starz Of the many spinoffs and imitations that Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show has spawned, maybe none has been as fascinating as Al-Bernameg, Egyptian for “The Show.” Sara Taksler’s Tickling Giants documents the rise and fall of this daring political satire program, which Bassem Youssef, a 37-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon, started in the laundry room of his Cairo apartment in 2011. The charismatic Youssef became one of Egypt’s most famous faces with a lovingly spot-on imitation of Stewart. The Show became a sensation, moving from YouTube to national TV before government authorities, unhappy with the mockery, forced it off the air in 2014. Taksler, a producer on The Daily Show since 2005, met Youssef when he was a Stewart guest in 2012 and proposed documenting his show. “We never…

THE TRADE (SHOWTIME) Matt Heineman, director The opioid crisis gets a full airing in this five-part series looking at cartels, users and law enforcement. I like to keep an open mind, and I think that’s the most exciting way to make documentaries like this, letting the story dictate where you want to go. It’s constantly evolving and constantly changing as the realities on the ground constantly shift, especially when you’re dealing with a subject like the opioid epidemic and looking at this issue through these three lenses: cartel members in Mexico, addicts in the U.S. and law enforcement in the U.S. You’re dealing generally with people who don’t necessarily want to be filmed. It took a long, long time to get access and gain the trust of our subjects. There…