Innholdsfortegnelse for Wednesday, June 12, 2019 i The Hollywood Reporter

On June 16, casual TV surfers (and AT&T executives) might be surprised if they check out what’s on the company’s HBO channel: an erect penis. It’s just one of many jarring elements of Euphoria, the new teen drama that offers perhaps the most unflinching, not to mention explicit, take on modern adolescence ever to hit U.S. television. The male genitalia in the pilot is not attached to any of the largely 20-something cast. Instead, it’s care of actor Eric Dane, who commits statutory rape with a 17-year-old trans girl (newcomer Hunter Schafer, 20). Though the sequence uses a prosthetic, it’s still likely to shock most audiences — as will a handful of other graphic scenes in the pilot, from a gut-wrenching drug overdose by star Zendaya, 22, to a sex…

On June 10, Paradigm chairman and CEO Sam Gores was greeted with a standing ovation when he walked into the talent agency’s Monday morning staff meeting. It was a day after he announced that he was not selling the company to UTA, and the relief was in marked contrast to the mood of uncertainty and confusion in the offices three days earlier, after THR reported that the firms were in talks. “There are reasons why a combination like this would have made sense for both agencies, but in the end, what is more compelling for us is how unique the culture at Paradigm is and how powerful our independent path can be,” Gores wrote to staff. Meanwhile, UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer said in a statement, “We are disappointed we didn’t…

47th AFI Life Achievement Award Hollywood, June 6 ATX Television Festival Austin, Texas, June 6-9 73rd Tony Awards New York, June 9 Party Crawler Denzel’s Big Night Among those in the Dolby Theatre to honor AFI Life Achievement Award recipient Denzel Washington (3) were Spike Lee (6), Julia Roberts (2) and Cicely Tyson (8), who received a standing O. “Mr. Washington’s arrival was a seismic moment for my generation,” said Oscar winner Mahershala Ali (7) of being inspired by the man of the hour. As for Washington, he began with: “If nothing else, I am living proof of the power of God.” — MIA GALUPPO Texas TV Party ATX — or “a television experience” — lived up to its name as the eighth iteration hosted scores of topical panels including…

Fortnite isn’t just a game — it’s also social media. So says a study from National Research Group, which provides a telling snapshot of the new attention economy. Fortnite players spend more of their free time logging into the battle royale game than they do scrolling through Facebook and Instagram or streaming on Netflix and YouTube. In the two years since its July 2017 launch, Fortnite has grown into a global phenomenon with more than 250 million active players (82 percent under age 35) and $2.4 billion in annual revenue. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was on to something when he noted in January that the streamer “competes (and loses) more with Fortnite than with HBO.” According to NRG, Fortnite players spend 21 percent of their free time with the game.…

Hydrogen is rising as L.A.’s next-wave eco auto, with Honda, Hyundai and Toyota all competing to be Hollywood’s new green mustdrive. Costing less than a Tesla Model S or X while providing equivalent range, hydrogen cars — or fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) — use an on-board fuel cell that combines hydrogen (from a fuel station) and oxygen (from the air) to power an electric motor. With zero carbon emissions, an FCEV has only one byproduct: a few ounces of water puddling under the tailpipe while parked. Hyundai may have moved only 273 Tucson FCEVs from 2013 to 2015, including one to Josh Duhamel, but the company’s recent Nexo represents a design leap with futuristic accents and a cockpit-like interior. Honda’s Clarity FCEV is more luxurious than previous models, while…

It’s not every day in the content-packed era of Peak TV that a show not only takes its time, but also meticulously sets the groundwork for a story clearly intended to unfold over multiple seasons. Showtime’s new 1990s Bostonset crime drama City on a Hill opts for precisely that kind of long-term approach. It’s audacious, but makes it hard to judge the series based on just the first three episodes sent to critics. It’s not even obvious who among the enormous cast — aside from Kevin Bacon and Aldis Hodge, the two engaging leads — ultimately will end up being central to the narrative; City on a Hill lays enough track in its first three hours to give everybody a sustained ride. Those first three hours are more intriguing than…

When the gender-parity industry coalition ReFrame launched two years ago, one of its three key aims was to change the trajectory for female directors who had scored their big break — and then gotten stuck, unable to transition to steady studio careers like so many of their equally talented male counterparts. Now the group — born out of a partnership between Women in Film and the Sundance Institute — is ready to reveal its remedy: ReFrame Rise, a two-year program that provides high-level industry sponsorship to help experienced female filmmakers advance to the next stage in their career. “It’s not just how you fill the pipeline, but how you move through the pipeline as well,” WIF Los Angeles executive director Kirsten Schaffer tells THR of the program, which Hulu is…

In late 1983, when the CBS morning game show Press Your Luck first came on the air, a 35-year-old Ohio ice-cream truck driver named Michael Larson saw the chance of a lifetime. He’d spent months watching game shows looking for one he could hack. Finally, once he cracked the code for Luck, he boarded a bus to L.A. in May 1984. The game — set to relaunch June 12 in primetime on ABC with Elizabeth Banks serving as host — had two parts. First, host Peter Tomarken asked contestants questions. A correct answer earned a spin on an 18-space board that hid cash and prizes. The idea was to stop the randomly bouncing cursor on a lucrative space, not on a “Whammy” that would erase the player’s accumulated winnings. Larson’s…

After its June 6 cancellation, Swamp Thing has become a case study in how a series gets axed in the Peak TV landscape. The drama, from Warner Bros. TV, was canceled a mere five days after its first episode debuted on the studio-backed DC Universe streaming platform. The remaining nine episodes of the drama will air weekly as the series, from exec producer James Wan, now becomes part of the upstart streamer’s programming library. The timing of the cancellation — days after it launched to warm reviews (92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) — raised eyebrows. Trouble began April 17 when Warners trimmed Swamp Thing’s order from 13 to 10 based on the creative output. Despite promising reviews, insiders thought that they had a dud on their hands and, rather than…

Exactly how he came to own it — and whether he ever actually wore it — the world will never know. But on June 15 and 16, Burt Reynolds’ Cannonball Run belt buckle will be up for grabs, along with truckloads of other knickknacks, paintings, garments, gadgets and assorted belongings of the late actor at a Julien’s auction in Beverly Hills. “Burt had a phenomenal collection of memorabilia from his life and career,” says director Adam Rifkin, who cast the ’80s icon in his final film, 2018’s The Last Movie Star; the two became close friends before Reynolds died at 82 in September. “His house in Florida had an entire room full of it — scripts, costumes, props. The vibe I got was that each of these mementos was a…

Emmy Season’s Battle Royale: Fairstein vs. DuVernay When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s Netflix miniseries about the Central Park Five, has received glowing reviews, but it’s left one viewer seething. Linda Fairstein, the 1980s prosecutor who convinced the teens to sign false confessions (years before they were exonerated by DNA evidence) has been calling Felicity Huffman’s portrayal of her “a basket of lies.” Since its May 31 airing, Fairstein, 72, has been dropped by Dutton (publisher of her 20-plus crime novels and children’s books) and pushed off the board of Vassar College. But DuVernay isn’t backing off. “It’s important people be held accountable,” she said at a June 9 FYC panel with Oprah Winfrey. The actual Five, who attended, weren’t in forgiving moods, either. “She had the power to do…

Elizabeth Banks and her producing partner and husband, Max Handelman, have just recommitted — to Hollywood. Their company, Brownstone Productions, has re-upped its first-look deal with Universal Pictures and its exclusive overall producing deal with Warner Bros. TV, for a combined sum in the high eight figures. Brownstone’s new pacts come at a moment of expansion for the Hunger Games and Pitch Perfect star and her company. Banks is in postproduction on a reboot of the Charlie’s Angels franchise, which she wrote and directed for Sony, with an eye toward a November release date. Brownstone’s breakout Hulu comedy, Shrill, has been renewed for its second season, and the company is developing a series for WarnerMedia’s new streaming service based on the Wondery podcast Over My Dead Body, with Banks set…

When Toscana opened, my wife, Jeanne, and I took our youngest — Reed, then 6 weeks old — for dinner. There was such a pleasant din, he slept the entire time. That night is symbolic of all our times at Toscana. It’s remained a special place to us. Usually a restaurant is a place you go for business or a place you go to relax with family. Toscana is where I do both. My former partner Dana Walden [now Disney TV Studios and ABC chairman] and I liked to take writers, producers or talent. Whether at lunch or dinner, we experienced a warm sense of belonging. That was the message we wanted people to feel about coming to 20th Century Fox: that you’re among family, you belong. It’s a great…

Succession offered a tough premise for TV viewers when it premiered last summer. The HBO satire-drama follows the Roy family, a backstabbing, scheming, Murdochian clan that owns a major conservative media conglomerate. When the patriarch and CEO of the company suffers a health scare, both immediate and extended family — no matter how well-heeled — begin grubbing for pieces of the company pie. With media conglomerates and dynastic families creating enough drama in real life, did consumers really want that in their fiction as well? The answer, it turned out, was yes: The show became a sleeper hit (it was renewed after just two episodes had aired). Fans paid homage to the show by turning Nicholas Braun’s clumsy “Cousin Greg” into an internet meme and subject of several laudatory think…

From multicam sitcoms to serialized dramas to creepy miniseries, family films to R-rated thrillers, supporting parts to star turns, Carla Gugino’s career has been difficult to pin down. For a small subset of viewers, her best role was in ABC’s Karen Sisco (2003), leaving us wondering why Hollywood hasn’t found her more work in a similarly hardboiled, Elmore Leonard-esque vein. Cinemax’s Jett comes close. Written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez (Elektra Luxx), the first five of its nine episodes are filled with suave crime lords, verbose henchmen, heists, sex and double-crosses, all anchored by an enigmatic protagonist: Gugino’s Daisy “Jett” Kowalski, an ex-thief hoping to stay clean after her release from jail. Of course, just when she thinks she’s out, she’s yanked back in by gangster Charlie Baudelaire (Giancarlo Esposito),…

As Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Endgame ends its run just shy of James Cameron’s all-time earner, Avatar, the Avengers themselves are starting to move on at the box office. MCU stalwarts Chris Hemsworth and Samuel L. Jackson will go toe-to-toe June 14 with Sony’s Men in Black: International and Warner Bros.’ Shaft. Marvel’s major players have had varying degrees of box office success outside the franchise. Thanks to Mission: Impossible and Sherlock Holmes, Jeremy Renner and Robert Downey Jr. have buoyed their extra-Marvel earnings, while Chris Evans has appeared in only two movies with nationwide releases since picking up his vibranium shield. Notes Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice Media, “Marvel is its own star, at a certain point.”…

I’ve never thought of myself as an angry person. I’ve never been a rager, a yeller or even a big disagree-er. If “Avoiding Confrontation” was an Olympic sport, I could have definitely medaled. That said, for the past few years, because I’m a woman who lives in this world, I have felt a seething resentment brewing inside me. It’s a growing disgust with the patriarchy and accompanying misogyny that seeks to control women, our bodies and our expectations of men. You know, that whole “It’s 2019, our president’s an admitted sexual assaulter, legal abortion is hanging on by a thread and the ERA still hasn’t passed” thing. But where do you put all that ire? What do you do with your anger when you were raised not to express it?…

First Look Next year, a one-mile stretch of the Sunset Strip will be home to three membership clubs. The newest entrant set to join Soho House and the previously announced Gwyneth Paltrow-backed Arts Club (not to mention more than a dozen others elsewhere across L.A.) is the Britely — currently under construction inside the Pendry West Hollywood hotel at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Olive Drive. Pendry’s owner — real estate firm Combined Properties — is betting that the duo of chef Wolfgang Puck and interior designer Martin Brudnizki, who did the acclaimed 2018 revamp of posh London members’ club Annabel’s, can provide enough pop and panache to draw 1,600 members (at $2,800 a year, with a 30 percent discount for anyone under 30). But in an increasingly crowded…

JAN. 10, 2018 “I think Hillary should be in jail, lock her up.”SEAN HANNITY The Fox News host, on his show, repeating the Trump campaign slogan. On June 6, Hannity criticized Nancy Pelosi for saying — at a private meeting — that she wanted to see the president in prison. “That happens in Banana Republics,” Hannity fumed, “it’s beyond despicable.”…

With political forces — Brexiters in England, far-right nationalists in Italy and France — apparently striving to tear Europe apart, it’s heartening to see how European television companies, at least, are pulling closer together. Faced with a growing threat from global streaming platforms for audience eyeballs — Netflix and Amazon Prime already are established in Europe; Disney+, Apple TV+ and WarnerMedia’s service will launch by 2020 — Europe’s old-media giants are joining forces to try to keep the barbarians from the gates. On May 29, Italian TV group Mediaset paid $368 million for slightly less than 10 percent of German commercial broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1, a first step in creating a pan-European television company. On June 7, Mediaset said it would set up a new holding firm, MediaForEurope, in the Netherlands to…

Built in 1927, downtown L.A.’s Engine Company No. 17 closed in 1980 and became a film location. When Dustin Lancaster, owner of Hotel Covell, was invited to look at the building on the corner of Santa Fe Avenue and 7th Street in 2016, the block was fairly desolate, with only Bestia, a high-end eatery and downtown pioneer, nearby. Now Warner Music Group’s West Coast headquarters sits across the street, and Soho House will debut a third L.A. location a block away. Suddenly Lancaster’s Firehouse Hotel (weekday rates start at $300), one of the first to open in L.A.’s Arts District, lives at the city’s hot epicenter. “I always want to stay in places that immerse me in a neighborhood,” says Lancaster, 39, who also owns L.A. wine bars Covell, Augustine…

On March 5, Susan Zirinsky was in her “crummy little office” along a dark corridor in the labyrinth of CBS News headquarters on West 57th Street. It was just a temporary spot, since it was technically only her second day on the job as president of CBS News. In reality, she had been steering the 91-year-old division since early January, when acting CBS Corp. CEO Joe Ianniello announced that she would succeed David Rhodes. Zirinsky was watching the live feed of Gayle King’s interview with R. Kelly, the R&B singer charged with multiple counts of criminal sexual abuse of young women. As the world now knows, an unhinged Kelly leaped from his seat in an explosion of tears, spittle and profanity. King remained almost motionless, offering a motherly entreaty: “Robert.”…

ENSEMBLE SHOWS GAME OF THRONES The HBO juggernaut, which wrapped its final season, holds the record for most Emmy wins (47, ahead of Frasier’s 37) and has won the drama series prize for its past three seasons. POSE Featuring a cast of new faces (including five trans actresses in major roles), the FX series backed by Ryan Murphy made a splash with its glitzy style and inclusive storytelling. THIS IS US NBC’s time-jumping family drama starring Milo Ventimiglia, Mandy Moore, Sterling K. Brown and Chrissy Metz was nominated for drama series for its first two seasons. SOLO MISSIONS BODYGUARD Richard Madden’s Golden Globe-winning turn as a bodyguard with PTSD has brought unexpected heat to this six-part Netflix thriller from BBC One. HOMECOMING What more do you need than movie star…

Few Chinese film studios have been as hard hit by the Beijing industry’s ongoing “cold winter” as Huayi Brothers Media. Arguably the country’s longest running and most dynamic private film company, Huayi Brothers was at the center of the Fan Bingbing tax evasion scandal, which led to its stock plummeting and losses of more than $160 million for 2018. But the company’s co-founders, brothers James and Dennis Wang, have weathered the ups and downs of China’s turbulent content business for more than two decades, and Huayi already appears poised for a comeback. Before Beijing put the breaks on outbound investment by Chinese studios two years ago, Huayi fired off a final dealmaking salvo in 2016, becoming the majority owner of Joe and Anthony Russo’s ambitious startup studio, AGBO Entertainment, with…