Innholdsfortegnelse for Monday November 19 2018 i The Hollywood Reporter

AFI Fest Hollywood, Nov. 8-15 Party Crawler A Festival Amid the Fires American Film Institute’s annual fest kicked off Nov. 8 with On the Basis of Sex. Hours before the premiere of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, filmmakers learned that the 85-year-old Supreme Court justice had been hospitalized after breaking three ribs. “To wake up to that was a little bit of a shock, as you can imagine, but she’s doing fine,” her nephew Daniel Stiepleman, the movie’s writer and executive producer, told THR at the TCL Chinese Theatre. The following evening saw a screening of Green Book, which tells the true story of the 1960s friendship between an Italian-American tough guy (Viggo Mortensen) (5) and a black classical pianist (Mahershala Ali) (5). That same night at the Vox Lux…

Roadside Attractions’ cup is running over these days, thanks in large measure to I Can Only Imagine, a Christian movie that is the opposite of the sort of prestige fare most indie distributors are known for. Run by Howard Cohen and Eric d’Arbeloff — the two are married and have a teenage son — Roadside is enjoying its biggest year ever, with domestic box office revenue registering at $110 million, just shy of Fox Searchlight ($120 million), even as other indies — Global Road, Broad Green — continue to implode. Roadside’s previous best was $75.7 million in 2016, led by the Oscar-nominated, Amazon Studios-produced Manchester by the Sea. The small, no-frills L.A. company, with a staff of about 25, continues to release 10 to 12 films a year. Lionsgate owns…

DICK CHENEY played by CHRISTIAN BALE The actor worked out his neck and spent four hours a day in the makeup chair. LYNNE CHENEY played by AMY ADAMS She gained weight (and wrinkles) and channeled her grandmother. GEORGE W. BUSH played by SAM ROCKWELL Didn’t swap notes with Vice producer/SNL Bush’s Will Ferrell. DONALD RUMSFELD played by STEVE CARELL Carell, who worked with McKay and Bale on The Big Short, helped bring on Adams.…

*Domestic only…

AIRDATE Sunday, Nov. 25 (Bravo) CAST Connie Britton, Eric Bana, Juno Temple, Julia Garner, Kevin Zegers CREATOR Alexandra Cunningham (from the podcast by Christopher Goffard) It’s one thing to turn a fiction podcast into a TV show — as Amazon’s Homecoming has done — but lifting a nonfiction podcast for a new medium often results in the same problem as adapting a documentary: You’re stripping away the immediacy of what was real, substituting performance and production design for authenticity. That’s not to say Bravo’s limited series version of the L.A. Times podcast (and article series) Dirty John is awful — just that in transition from “I can’t believe that’s real!” source material to “Aren’t Tami Taylor and the Incredible Hulk good?,” some essential vitality has been lost. Connie Britton plays…

Karey Burke The Freeform exec lands the top job at ABC Entertainment as Channing Dungey exits and new Disney TV chief Dana Walden builds her team. Sheryl Sandberg The Facebook COO is under fire after a New York Times exposé reveals the company ignored Russian meddling and hired a PR firm to slime critics. Jim Acosta The CNN reporter gets his press pass back (at least temporarily) after a D.C. judge rules the White House can’t suspend access without due process. Jimmy Fallon Two years after falling behind Stephen Colbert in total viewers, the Tonight Show host now cedes the 18-to-49 demo crown as well, with NBC trailing CBS season to date. Showbiz Stocks $17.49 (+14%) E.W. SCRIPPS CO. (SSP) The owner of more than 30 TV stations posts better-than-expected…

BEST PICTURE First Reformed Writer-director Paul Schrader’s austere drama about faith in the modern world saw a big boost from the 34th Spirit Award nominations on Nov. 16. The A24 release earned best feature, director and screenplay noms as well as a lead actor nomination for Ethan Hawke, who plays a tortured Protestant minister. You Were Never Really Here Director Lynne Ramsay’s film, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a hired gun looking for a missing girl, also built momentum as the Amazon picture earned four Spirit noms — for feature, male lead, director and editing. This comes on the heels of Cannes prizes for Ramsay’s screenplay and Phoenix’s performance. ACTRESS Nicole Kidman Destroyer The Oscar winner’s vanity-free portrait of a tough detective in Karyn Kusama’s drama won applause at its…

For my 12th birthday, my cousin Nancy gave me a paperback. She might as well have given me underwear, that’s how uninterested I was. But as it happened I had a book report due in English and this one wasn’t especially thick, so I gave it a read. I loved it. The book was The Princess Bride, and when I finished it I not only crushed the report, I wrote a letter to the author, William Goldman, to tell him how much I enjoyed it (and to complain that the back cover promised sex parts that weren’t, in fact, in the book). A week or so later he wrote me back — and not just an obligatory fan mail response. It was a letter, typewritten with mistakes X’d out, in…

Paul Feig DIRECTOR, A SIMPLE FAVOR, ON GIFTING MEN’S FASHION A gift should be a nice halfway point between the giftee and the gift giver. I’m known for turning out in suits and ties, so accessories are a sure path for the holidays. POCKET SILKS Where a lot of menfolk don’t wear ties these days, they will sport one of these stuffed in their jacket over an open-necked shirt. Yet most don’t buy them for themselves. When we did A Simple Favor, Anna Kendrick got me a beautiful Hermes tie and pocket silk. I loved and wore both to set two days later, and she was so happy to see a gift in use. Blue is never risky — every man wears blue. Pocket silks are also a chance to…

Mary Queen of Scots RELEASE DATE Dec. 7, 2018 Working Title had a hit with 1998’s Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett, and Working Title cochairman Tim Bevan says, “In doing that I learned about Mary Queen of Scots, same time, same age, and have been wanting to make that movie ever since.” Josie Rourke directs Saoirse Ronan as Mary Stuart and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I. On the Basis of Sex RELEASE DATE Dec. 25, 2018 By virtue of its involvement in Amblin Partners, which has a Universal deal, Participant Media’s films often find a home at Focus. And Peter Kujawski says Mimi Leder’s drama about a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, starring Felicity Jones, “is a perfect example of a movie that’s going to speak to an audience we know well.”…

Signing on to play Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate was a no-brainer for Willem Dafoe. Friends with director Julian Schnabel for 30 years, Dafoe figured that “the idea of a great painter and a great filmmaker making a film about a painter made sense,” he said. “I wanted to be his van Gogh. What can I say?” Dafoe, 63, who won Venice’s best actor prize when the film premiered there in September, portrays the iconic painter during his time in Arles, France, when he painted some of his greatest works but also suffered from mental illness and cut off part of his ear. Dafoe, who will be honored at the Gotham Awards with the actor’s tribute, spoke to THR about personalizing van Gogh, which paintings he kept from…

BEST ACTOR Favorite Lars Mikkelsen in Ride Upon the Storm Mikkelsen’s complex and conflicted turn as a Protestant priest in this Danish drama is as good as it gets. Longshot Julio Andrade in One Against All Andrade delivers a Breaking Bad-quality performance as a public defender falsely imprisoned as a drug dealer in this crime drama. Sadly, the show has not yet broken big outside Brazil. BEST ACTRESS Favorite Emily Watson in Apple Tree Yard The British vet shines in this thriller as an eminent scientist who risks everything to enter into a dangerous affair. Longshot Thuso Mbedu in Is’thunzi She might be below the radar of most viewers, but the jury would do well to recognize this rising star, nominated for the second year running for her role as ambitious go-getter Winnie in…

The list of content assets controlled by WarnerMedia is massive — from the Harry Potter and DC Comics universes to classic movies and TV shows like Gone With the Wind and Friends — but those might not be enough to compete in the streaming wars, especially when Disney launches its Disney+ service next year. Hence, Wall Street wasn’t too surprised to read that WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey and NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke recently held preliminary talks about licensing titles for WarnerMedia’s forthcoming streaming service. Such a partnership makes sense, considering that the AT&T property could add popular franchises like Fast & Furious, Sherlock Holmes, Back to the Future and Jurassic Park to WarnerMedia’s already impressive arsenal of 7,000 movies and 5,000 TV series. And NBCUniversal, which, outside of a 30…

AMAZON SCARES UP BLUMHOUSE: ‘IT’S A BIT OF AN INNOVATION’ Deal of the Week The lines among film, television and digital media continue to blur with Amazon and Blumhouse’s new pact. The streamer’s first global, direct-to-service deal for feature-length programming calls for Jason Blum’s Blumhouse TV to produce a thematically linked series of eight thrillers, all made by underrepresented filmmakers. Blumhouse TV co-president Marci Wiseman tells THR that her studio is filling a hole for Amazon: original content that falls outside the all-at-once series model that’s become the hallmark of streamers. “There’s a lot of need for feature-length content on video-on-demand and other platforms,” she says. “The ability to do things that are made directly for that audience and have some connective tissue creates another kind of viewing experience than…

Births Emily Lu Aldrich, vp national film & television publicity at Shelter PR, and her husband, producer Ryland Aldrich, welcomed son Kaycen Lucian Aldrich on Nov. 2 at Pasadena Huntington Hospital. Weddings Jordan Dorso, talent manager at Untitled Entertainment, married actor Wes Aderhold on Nov. 10 at the Paramour Estate in Silver Lake in front of 150 guests. The couple will honeymoon in Charleston, South Carolina. Congrats Sean Cohan was named president of Wheelhouse Entertainment Nov. 15. Lionsgate extended COO Brian Goldsmith’s contract to 2022 on Nov. 15. Deaths Katherine MacGregor, who portrayed Harriet Oleson on Little House on the Prairie, died Nov. 13 in Woodland Hills. She was 93. James Greene, the Broadway veteran who played Councilman Milton on Parks and Recreation, died Nov. 9 in Los Angeles. He…

A day after Universal’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man opened to a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival on Aug. 29, a political rocket came blasting out of the conservative netherworld to knock it from its orbit. That’s when news spread that the movie had omitted a real-life scene: Armstrong planting the American flag on the moon. Right-wing outrage was immediate and helped ding the picture at the box office, where it failed to draw a crucial male demographic and earned a muted $44 million domestically. What’s intriguing in this isn’t just how politics suddenly and explosively intersected with an awards-season release, it’s how the studio failed to punch back. Universal execs could have argued that the film is a celebration of an American hero; they could even have…

IT’S THE EVE OF THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS, AND ADAM MCKAY IS FEELING OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS’ PROSPECTS OF TAKING BACK THE HOUSE. Still, the SNL writer turned Oscar-winning filmmaker insists he is not throwing a results-viewing party with his Hollywood friends, even as I spot an assistant carrying supplies from Whole Foods into his West Hollywood offices. Instead, McKay, looking like a college professor with a corduroy jacket and scarf, says he is planning to hang out at his house with his wife, director Shira Piven (Jeremy’s sister), their two daughters and his mother-in-law, and together they will “very calmly and somberly watch the results,” he says. “I will not make the mistake I made in 2016, when we had a party in New York while we were in the…

Nick Vallelonga had been thinking about making a movie about his dad, Tony Lip, since he was a teenager. He started recording interviews with his father in his 20s and mapped it all out in his 30s. But he couldn’t really make the film — an odd-couple dramedy about his father’s road trip with classical pianist Don Shirley through an intolerant South during the 1960s — until 2013, at the request of one of its subjects. “Dr. Shirley asked me to not make this movie until he passed away, for whatever his reasons were,” says Vallelonga. “I had to respect that.” When both his father and Shirley passed away in 2013, Vallelonga set about writing the script for Green Book in earnest. He says it was difficult to write the…

Source: The week’s most active and talked-about entertainers on leading social networking sites Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for the week ending Nov. 13. Rankings are based on a formula blending weekly additions of fans as well as cumulative weekly reactions and conversations, as tracked by MVP Index.…

Planes, Trains and Automobiles Was No Turkey in ’87 If ever there was a Hollywood salute to torturous Thanksgiving travel, it was the 1987 film Planes, Trains and Automobiles. THR was more than willing to accept the John Hughes comedy’s premise that getting somewhere on a national long weekend is equivalent to entering a mobile purgatory. “If there are any carefree souls out there who don’t yet have the heebie-jeebies about holiday travel,” said THR, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles should put them in the same high state of hysteria the rest of us are in.” The setup for the Paramount film that mixed the genres of road trip, buddy comedy and holiday schmaltz had a control-freak marketing exec (Steve Martin, then 42) being forced into a three-day odyssey from New…