Innholdsfortegnelse for Wednesday, July 31, 2019 i The Hollywood Reporter

On June 18, as a chant of “CNN sucks!” broke out across a crowded arena in Orlando, CNN anchor John Berman interrupted the network’s live coverage of Donald Trump’s 2020 kickoff event to reveal a change in programming plans. “Within two minutes, he did talk about the economy,” Berman told viewers. “But, within four minutes, it was attacks on the media.” The network broke away. For some who decried CNN’s tendency to broadcast candidate Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies live and unedited, the decision to cut away from President Trump’s latest MAGA-fest was a welcome one. But then, exactly one month later, the network turned the lineup draw for the July 30 and 31 Democratic primary debates into a dramatic, hourlong live television event that was aggressively marketed as “The Draw.”…

After years of breakneck growth, China’s film sector is in the grips of a contraction. Among the 12 most influential publicly traded film companies in the country, all but one said in July earnings reports that they expect profits to fall or crash into the red. The carnage includes a 55 percent to 65 percent profit decline at Wanda Film Holding Co., a profit crash of more than 200 percent at pioneering studio Huayi Brothers Media, and even a 253 percent slide into losses at Beijing Culture, the hit-making studio known for all-time box office champion Wolf Warrior 2. Last year’s abrupt crackdown on tax evasion in the industry — which ensnared actress Fan Bingbing — has been followed this year by an aggressive tightening of censorship control, leading to…

Mrs. Mnuchin’s ‘Self-Absorbed Narcissistic Sociopath’ Louise Linton may make history as the first spouse of a U.S. treasury secretary ever to appear onscreen in a three-way sex scene. Steven Mnuchin’s wife — who nearly broke the internet in 2017 after being photographed at the U.S. Mint holding a fresh sheet of currency while wearing opera gloves — just wrapped production on Me, You, Madness, a low-budget serial killer comedy that she wrote, produced, directed and stars in. “I took the opportunity to play on my reputation — which is completely off-base — by making my character a self-absorbed, narcissistic, homicidal sociopath,” Linton, 38, tells THR during a visit to the film’s L.A. set. If that weren’t enough to raise eyebrows, Linton wrote a menage a trois for herself and co-star…

After Steven Spielberg visited the offices of video streaming startup Quibi this year, he emailed his friend and founder Jeffrey Katzenberg with an idea. “To say I was surprised is an understatement,” Katzenberg recalls. “He had, himself, written four chapters of a super scary, pretty creepy story.” But Spielberg had a stipulation. He wanted the project to be viewed only after sundown. So Katzenberg asked Quibi CEO Meg Whitman to convene the product and engineering teams, which went on to develop a feature that will unlock new episodes of the Spielberg show, dubbed After Dark, only once night has fallen. “Arguably the greatest storyteller of our time, when he hears about something new and different, he turns his imagination loose, and there you go,” Katzenberg says. “I would never have…

Styling by Jason Rembert On Snook: Zac Posen dress, Rene Caovilla shoes, Bulgari earrings, Cartier and Piaget rings. On Culkin: Saint Laurent suit and shoes, Piaget lapel pin, Bulgari watch, Tiffany & Co. rings. On Macfadyen: Ermenegildo Zegna suit, Thom Browne shoes. On Cox: Brioni suit, Christian Louboutin shoes. On Braun: Thom Browne suit and shoes, Tiffany & Co. bracelet and ring. On Strong: Brunello Cucinelli suit, Gianvito Rossi shoes. On Ruck: Giorgio Armani suit, Christian Louboutin shoes, Cartier watch. One day last summer, a bleary-eyed Brian Cox was fetching a morning latte at a shop near his London flat when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around to see a bearded gentleman in line behind him. “I just want to say, I’m really enjoying the show,”…

George Hamilton doesn’t mind if you lead with his tan. As he embarks on his ninth decade — he turns 80 on Aug. 12 — the actor and avatar of ease knows that his hue is what has made him an icon. Also a durable punchline. While he’s the first to laugh about it — explaining that his dermatologist long ago “just gave up” on convincing him to limit his solar exposure, and counting himself lucky not to have been felled by skin cancer — he remains an evangelist for sunbathing, which he started because he didn’t like wearing film makeup that melted in the heat. Hamilton, who once received an honorary degree from the International Smart Tan Network, a trade association for indoor tanning facilities, that he still prominently…

Hollywood may be the center of the film business, but when the time came to canvass the industry for THR’s annual roster of the best visual effects schools, six international selections made the cut, reflecting the increasingly global nature of the VFX business. With Canada leading the way, foreign schools are producing such talent as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World helmer Dean DeBlois, a graduate of Ontario’s Sheridan College. France’s ArtFX won this year’s Visual Effects Society Award for a student work, and a VRproject from Germany’s Filmakademie was honored at Siggraph Asia. When it comes to making movie magic, the master illusionists hail from across the globe — with many coming from one of these 10 premier programs. ACADEMY OF ART UNIVERSITY SAN FRANCISCO The School…

Desus Nice and The Kid Mero, promoting their aptly titled Showtime series Desus & Mero in January, did the impossible: They won over the stony, often despondent members of the Television Critics Association at the biannual press tour. So, when the time came to tap emcees for the TCA’s summer awards ceremony, the Bronx-bred pair proved an obvious choice. Hitting Los Angeles for that and two shows at The Ace just as their talk show crosses the six-month mark, Desus, 38, and Mero, 36, caught up with THR to talk about growing pains, finding their groove and the excitement and fatigue of covering their first election on TV. The show looks different since it premiered. What’s been the biggest change? THE KID MERO The only thing we really changed was…

When Rich Paul met LeBron James at the Akron-Canton Airport back in 2002 — Paul was 21 and James was a teenager heading to Atlanta for the NCAA Final Four — he probably never imagined that someday he’d represent James in NBA deals worth $342 million and counting. Seventeen years later, with 23 NBA players at his Klutch Sports Group, Paul is breaking into the Hollywood firmament via an investment from UTA and the newly created position of head of UTA Sports. It’s an effort by the Jeremy Zimmer-led agency to establish a sports business amid a content arms race that is looking to athletes as creators. The deal gives UTA an on-court business to the tune of $1 billion in contract value as well as instant credibility in athlete…

Big Deal Two Hollywood publicity powerhouses are joining forces. PR firms Rogers & Cowan and PMK • BNC, which are both part of IPG’s Octagon Sports and Entertainment Network, are merging into one. Together, their 500-plus talent roster will include Michael B. Jordan, Brie Larson, Robert Redford and Stephen Curry, while their portfolio of more than 30 brands will include Audi, McDonald’s, YouTube and Verizon. “When we realized what we were putting together, it was epic,” says PMK • BNC chairman and CEO Cindi Berger, who will serve as chairman for the combined, to-be-named company, touting PMK • BNC and Rogers & Cowan’s complementary strengths in film/television and sports, respectively. Berger will lead the 350-plus staff alongside current Rogers & Cowan CEO Mark Owens, who will retain the title of…

Chris Morgan is a rarity in the studio mega-franchise world: a hired gun turned key architect. The 48-year-old writer has penned every Fast & Furious movie made since the third installment, 2006’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, along the way becoming a full-fledged producer on Universal’s prized asset, one that has generated more than $5.1 billion at the global box office. Morgan, whose mother is a novelist — she would write during her lunch hour while running a home day care — followed in her footsteps by initially writing scripts while working at a video store in his L.A. suburb hometown of La Cañada. Now he is spearheading the franchise’s expansion into spinoffs, working with Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham to launch Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs &…

On a trip to Rwanda to direct a miniseries about conservationist Dian Fossey for National Geographic, I got to meet mountain gorillas in their habitat. There are none in captivity; they exist only in the wild in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and in the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda, Uganda and DRC. Gorilla tourism is huge in Rwanda: When a baby gorilla is born, its naming ceremony is a state affair. I arrived at Kigali airport on a sticky evening. Kigali is a beautiful city sitting 5,000 feet above sea level on green hills. My producer and I drove to Musanze, which at an altitude of 9,000 feet is the gateway to Volcanoes National Park, and home to Fossey’s former camp (stays from $75; governorscamp.com). Our gorilla trek was led…

LEAD BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL CONSULTANT Former Wall Street Journal reporter Merissa Marr serves as the main expert on all things business-related on the show. When a plotline involving $3 billion in debt arose, she advised on how to proceed. TV NEWS CONSULTANT The former executive producer of Fox News’ Lou Dobbs Tonight and CNN’s American Morning, Jim McGinnis gave tips on several season two broadcast news sequences, including a talking-head appearance Logan forces Kendall to do. MEDIA AND SOCIAL CONSULTANT Author and host of CNN Style Derek Blasberg offers tips on how New York rich act and dress, i.e., they don’t wear loads of outer clothes because they go directly from the chopper to the limo. WEDDING CONSULTANT The epic, three-day nuptials at a Scottish castle that closed season one were…

VENUE Al Hirschfeld Theatre (New York) CAST Karen Olivo, Aaron Tveit, Danny Burstein, Sahr Ngaujah BOOK John Logan DIRECTOR Alex Timbers Moulin Rouge! was Baz Luhrmann at his most baroque, a pop-cultural magpie molding kitsch, cool and cliche into a rhapsodic dream; the 2001 screen collision of soaring romance and dazzling artifice helped resuscitate the movie musical. Stage director Alex Timbers and his team on this delirious theatrical reinvention take those Luhrmann impulses and run with them, crafting a gaudy, gorgeous jukebox pastiche in which eye-popping spectacle, energy and musical mashups provide the padding for a featherweight plot. The result can be tiring, but it virtually defies you not to be entertained. There is no question as to where the play’s reported $28 million budget was spent. Music rights alone…

Siggraph, the annual confab dedicated to computer graphics, is knitting together a playful animated character and potent contemporary message by awarding the top prize in its Electronic Theater animation competition to Kristen Lester’s Purl. The new Pixar animated short follows the whimsical tale of a pink ball of yarn who struggles for acceptance in her male-dominated work environment. Director roles in the animation community still are largely dominated by men. Lester, who is head of story on Pixar chief creative Pete Docter’s next movie, Soul, says she based Purl in part on her own experience of being a female animator at the Disney-owned studio. “Over the period of my career, I really wanted to fit in and be accepted to do the thing that I loved doing,” she says. Lester…

It was probably for the best that Baz Luhrmann gave Moulin Rouge! an exclamation point. It differentiated his 2001 film from John Huston’s Moulin Rouge, the 1952 drama that served as Zsa Zsa Gabor’s big break. “I think it gets the exclamation point because it’s the nature of that world,” says Luhrmann. “It’s ‘The Moulin Rouge!’ Nothing is flat; everything is over the top.” The director’s $50 million Fox production ($72 million today) starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor was predicted to flop and opened at No. 4 behind Pearl Harbor, Shrek and Rob Schneider’s The Animal, but went on to gross $180 million worldwide ($260 million today), got an Oscar nomination for best picture and won a Golden Globe for best musical or comedy. When the musical set in…

The Nine (SHE WRITES PRESS, AUG. 20) BY Jeanne Blasberg AGENCY April Eberhardt Lit The topical novel tackles sexual misconduct at an elite boarding school and the fallout for a young male eyewitness and his mother. As HBO’s Euphoria continues to make waves, kids dealing with very adult issues will likely be popping up in film and TV. Stolen Things (DUTTON, AUG. 20) BY R.H. Herron AGENCY APA A veteran 911 dispatcher receives a call from her own daughter, drugged in a professional football player’s home. The novel, which is reminiscent of crime thrillers like Searching or Dirty John, follows the dispatcher as she tries to find her daughter and the truth.…

At one of Guy Shalem’s Meeting of the Masters dinners, a soccer pro might be seated next to a real estate agent who might be seated next to one of Hollywood’s top execs. These high-profile but disparate guests are directed to look under their plate or seat cushion to find a charm — shaped like a butterfly or maybe a cat (actor Jim Rash found a rose). Finding your “soulmate” with the matching emblem is a way to spark fresh conversation. (And occasional friction: A former studio head at one dinner was seen in an uncomfortable exchange with a pro-Trump author.) The concept took root in 2006, when Jane Lynch wanted to host dinners for cast and crew (Wendi McLendon-Covey, Eric McCormack) of Lovespring International, a Lifetime comedy co-created by…

Weddings Rory Platt, an agent at ICM Partners, married Greg Giacopuzzi on July 13 at the Adamson House in Malibu. The couple will honeymoon in Barcelona, St. Tropez and Paris. YouTube personality Gigi Gorgeous married Nats Getty (great-grand-daughter of J. Paul Getty) on July 26 at the Rosewood Miramar Beach hotel in Montecito, California. The couple became engaged in March 2018. Births Ben Rowe, partner at Grandview Automatik, and wife Audrey Gordon Rowe, an agent at CAA, welcomed daughter Ruthie Bea Rowe on July 11 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Congrats Voltage Pictures appointed Adam Wright as executive vp international sales July 22. Britney Davis was promoted to vp artist relations, marketing & special projects for Capitol Music Group on July 23. Nickelodeon named Jenny Wall chief marketing officer…

Much has been made about the impact of deep-pocketed investors on Hollywood’s talent agencies. Endeavor, CAA and UTA all have taken on majority or substantial stakeholders, and Endeavor is seeking to go public. But management, another key component of the talent community, also is being reshaped by outside money, and with the influx of cash comes issues of control and direction. Consider Rick Yorn, one of the industry’s top managers, with a client roster that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Martin Scorsese. More than a decade ago, Yorn’s LBI Entertainment took a previously undisclosed loan from billionaire investor Ron Burkle, who is now using that leverage in a push to combine LBI with other Burkle-backed management entities, sources tell THR. A spokesperson for Burkle denies any clash with Yorn.…

Nothing compares to Africa — in particular, the Serengeti, where you witness the lives of animals, from family bonds to courtships to a zest for fun. My visit last year with my daughter, Grace, then 7, was extra special: When I was her age, I lived in Ghana, where my father had a school. The pride and joy I felt taking Grace to Africa for the first time made the trip especially meaningful. After flying in from London and a good night’s sleep at Hemingways Nairobi (from $325), we headed to Singita Sasakwa in the remote Grumeti Reserve via private charter. We were greeted by a most gracious staff and a dazzle of zebras. It was a short drive to Singita Sasakwa Lodge, and our guide stopped several times to…

Jim Markham remembers vividly the days following the grisly Manson murders of Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, her former boyfriend and hairstylist Jay Sebring and three others at the director’s Benedict Canyon residence in August 1969. At the time, Markham was Sebring’s protege and business partner in a budding franchise of men’s hair salons that stretched from a star packed outpost on the corner of L.A.’s Melrose and Fairfax to Miami. Sebring became the second person to die at the hands of the Manson Family members during an infamous killing spree that claimed seven lives, including coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her lover, Polish screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski. Markham, then 25 and splitting his time between his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and L.A., was the heir apparent to Sebring’s…

Logan Roy still runs his media empire at 80 and plays his children (Kendall, Roman and Shiv) against one another. Rupert Murdoch, 88, remains Fox Corp. chairman after his kids wrestled for control (Lachlan is exec chairman of Fox Corp., James left the company and Elisabeth is a media exec in the U.K.). In episode one, Logan has a brain hemorrhage after his birthday celebration and his children rush to his bedside. In January 2018, a few months before his 87th birthday, Murdoch fell on Lachlan’s yacht, resulting in broken vertebrae and a spinal hematoma. His children rushed to his bedside. In episode seven, Logan arranges a group therapy session with his children and their spouses at a ranch in New Mexico. It does not go well. Several years ago,…

I USED TO have perfect vision, now I pretty much wear glasses all the time. I used to have a lot of hair and now I’m losing it in the back and front. What’s left on my head is getting steadily grayer, catching up with my much-more-salt-than-pepper beard. I have tendinitis in my right Achilles and my left forearm and bicep. That’s it for the liability side of my health ledger. In terms of assets, I have a low resting heart rate, a low PSA (the measurement for prostate cancer risk), low blood pressure and low body fat. My daily regimen includes aggressive exercise, intermittent fasting, a vegan diet and avoidance of drugs, alcohol, sugar and anything that might hasten my descent into decrepitude and, ultimately, the terrifying abyss that…

AIRDATE Wednesday, July 31 (Hulu)  CAST Nathalie Emmanuel, Nikesh Patel, Rebecca Rittenhouse, Brandon Mychal Smith, John Reynolds, Zoe Boyle CREATORS Mindy Kaling, Matt Warburton You probably don’t need to be told that a TV series version of the 1994 movie Four Weddings and a Funeral is a bad idea. So it comes as no surprise that said series, more like a distant cousin than a remake or reimagining, is a clumsy mess of predictability, stereotypes, forced drama and saccharine touches. Perhaps Hulu thought, given the often lowered standards when it comes to romantic comedy, that a watered-down take on this beloved property would work. Mindy Kaling’s love of rom-coms presumably led to her targeting one of the best; the original film, of course, was written by Richard Curtis, who proved…