Innholdsfortegnelse for Wednesday, August 14, 2019 i The Hollywood Reporter

When Sumner Redstone split CBS from Viacom in 2006, he was busting up a major conglomerate in the hope that the assets would be better appreciated separately for their different qualities — CBS for its steady reliability and Viacom for its riskier, hit-driven growth potential. It didn’t quite work out that way, and now daughter Shari Redstone is struggling to turn a couple of relatively small companies into a single entity. On Aug. 13, CBS and Viacom said that they plan to recombine to create a company valued at about $31 billion — not exactly in the league of AT&T-WarnerMedia ($255 billion), or even Netflix ($137 billion). If a deal closes, the new entity — dubbed ViacomCBS — would aim to do battle not only with those much larger conglomerates…

How much work is too much for a top showrunner? In a Peak TV era overflowing with choice, content creators big and small are leveraging the demand for their services with deals for exclusivity on different platforms. On Aug. 7, Jeff Davis (Criminal Minds) inked a “broadcast-only” overall deal with the newly independent Fox Entertainment. While the pact was designed to be beneficial to the network — which says it also could sell Davis’ fare to outside platforms — the showrunner is still free to sign another TV overall deal elsewhere. That practice, multiple sources tell THR, has been growing quietly for the past few years as new platforms have emerged. Deals such as CBS TV Studios’ 2015 pact with Ridley Scott’s Scott Free are also for broadcast only. Now,…

I try not to beg, but please. I am on my knees (honor system, just believe me). Consider voting for me to win an Emmy. Set me free. I My name is Megan Amram. I’m a comedy writer, and there are two things I care about in terms of my career. One is making television that inspires people, makes them laugh, feel less alone, realize there are good people and good actions left in the world. The other is winning awards. My primary job is writing for the NBC show The Good Place, which was nominated for best comedy series this year. That’s awesome! But one nomination is not nearly enough for me. See, the thing is, I would really like to win an Emmy. That is why I made…

Big Deal Hackman Capital has added another pillar to its foundation as a major studio owner. On Aug. 7, the Los Angeles-based real estate investment firm acquired Manhattan Beach Studios from the Carlyle Group for $650 million, adding the 22-acre, 587,000-square-foot production facility to a portfolio that already includes Culver City’s Culver Studios, where Hackman is building out Amazon Studios’ new headquarters, and Television City in L.A.’s Fairfax district that it purchased from CBS in 2018 for $750 million. MBS’ $650 million price tag includes the acquisition of both the property and MBS Services, which provides wraparound production resources like lighting and grip equipment for content creators. The studio is the headquarters of James Cameron and Jon Landau’s Lightstorm Entertainment, now at work on the Avatar sequels. Unlike Culver Studios…

By the end of his life, Jerry Weintraub, who died in 2015, was best known in Hollywood for producing and appearing in the Ocean’s movies. But before entering the film industry, the onetime assistant to Lew Wasserman made his name, and his fortune, in the 1970s by revolutionizing the concert business — the focus of a Grammy Museum exhibition, opening Aug. 15 and running through early December, which draws from his family’s personal archives. It chronicles how, beginning when he convinced Colonel Parker to take Elvis on the road, he invented the national arena act. “He went around to regional promoters, went direct to these bigger venues that hadn’t been used in this way before, and allowed artists to own their tours,” says show curator Kelsey Goelz. “He innovated the…

Weddings Marc Kamler, a partner in alterative and factual programming at APA, married Robyn Briody, a yoga/fitness instructor, on July 20 at the Westmount Country Club in Woodland Park, New Jersey, in front of 125 people. The couple will honeymoon in Bora Bora in September. Director Joachim Ronning (Kon-Tiki, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man Tell No Tales), married Amanda Hearst, co-founder of sustainable fashion retailer Maison De Mode, on Aug. 2 at Hearst Castle, the estate built by the bride’s maternal great-grandfather William Randolph Hearst, in San Simeon, California. Births Director Jon M. Chu and wife Kristin Chu welcomed son Jonathan Heights Chu on July 26 in New York City. Congrats Walt Disney Animation Studios president Andrew Millstein joined Blue Sky Studios as copresident alongside co-president Robert Baird, and…

When it was announced in September that I would be joining the writing staff of Hulu’s rebooted Veronica Mars series, some people took it as a sign that the zombie apocalypse was imminent. What was next? Meat Loaf show-running Black-ish? Mike Tyson as dialogue coach for the Downton Abbey movie? Others expressed excitement that I would bring a diverse perspective to the show. I did campaign hard for more characters over 7 feet tall, but their systemic prejudice kept most actors between 5-foot-1 (Kristen Bell) and 6 feet (Ken Marino). For those still scratching your heads at how I ended up in the writers room, the journey started a couple of years ago. I was writing an article for the Los Angeles Times about some of my favorite young-adult novels.…

When LAUSD board member and charter school advocate Ref Rodriguez pleaded guilty in July 2018 to a felony count of conspiracy, it seemed that Los Angeles’ charter school movement had hit a critical low. Rodriguez’s unraveling over campaign finance violations tipped the balance of power on the seven-member board that oversees the nation’s second-largest school district, weakening its charter school block. Tensions between proponents of public schools and of charter schools — which are started by parents, teachers or community groups and receive government funding but operate independently of state school systems — were already high. The January teachers’ strike won concessions for LAUSD public schools ranging from smaller class sizes to hiring full-time nurses but was marked by heated anti-charter rhetoric. Critics of charters say they continue to drain…

Small but mighty, THR’s Young Hollywood 2019 honorees are punching above their weight. From Emmy nominee Asante Blackk to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood scene-stealer Julia Butters, these under-18 actors are gracing tentpoles and auteur projects, filling their Coogan accounts, amassing millions of social media followers and sharing the screen with the likes of Meryl Streep. And while they’re clearly destined for bigger things — with some already stepping into the director’s chair and producer pitch meetings — they relish the kid life, too. Hot tip for adults from Avengers’ Ariana Greenblatt: “Life is too short not to have fun.” ASHER ANGEL 16 Known for Shazam! Angel, who first garnered attention as a heartthrob on Disney Channel’s Andi Mack, added a $364.5 million credit to his résumé as the…

My brothers and I came to L.A. as break-dancers when I was about 10, and by the time I was 15, I was working on this really big movie, with Steven Spielberg and Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams. It’s a shocking experience, running into fans for the first time — it’s a lot for anyone to take. I was 15 when I did Rufio and now I’ve been Rufio for more of my life than I haven’t been. Wrestling with that is always interesting because you don’t want to be fully defined by it, but at the same time it’s you, and you don’t want to be ashamed of you either. Starting out so young meant missing out on a lot of things that kids do, that your friends are…

David Benioff & D.B. Weiss “The Iron Throne” The series’ creators wrapped up this epic journey by helming the final episode themselves (it’s the only one they’ve directed as a team). The episode reveals who will become the new leader of Westeros. David Nutter “The Last of the Starks” The longtime TV veteran has helmed episodes for GoT since 2012, and the nominated episode, which became infamous because of its accidental inclusion of a 2019 coffee cup, was his ninth and final episode. Miguel Sapochnik “The Long Night” It took three months of grueling night shoots (shot mostly from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m.) to complete the 82-minute battle episode, the series’ longest. The cinematic feat ends with the death of the Night King.…

Defying a slowly shrinking population and the rise of streaming platforms, Japan’s box office is spiking in 2019 thanks to rising wages, a shift in corporate culture and a strong lineup of local and Hollywood films. Box office revenue was up 16 percent in the first half of the year, with July alone surging 30 percent from the same corridor in 2018, per local entertainment news service Bunkatsushin. It’s shaping up to be a banner year for Hollywood, which hasn’t claimed more than 50 percent of the Japan box office since 2007, when the country was the No. 2 moviegoing market in the world behind North America and China. This year was sparked by Bohemian Rhapsody, which topped the charts for two weeks in January despite having debuted Nov. 9.…

The Swallows (BALLANTINE BOOKS, AUG. 13) BY Lisa Lutz AGENCY WME Alex Witt has just started work as a boarding school teacher when she uncovers a long-held social hierarchy run by male students. The novel tackles the topical, real-life dangers of male privilege that can be seen on many high school and college campuses. What Is a Girl Worth? (TYNDALE MOMENTUM, SEPT. 10) BY Rachael Denhollander AGENCY UTA The first woman to publicly come forward against gymnastics doctor and serial child molester Larry Nassar pens a memoir that, like docuseries Surviving R. Kelly and Leaving Neverland, looks into the emotional impact of headline-dominating abuse cases.…

In early July, First Media noticed that YouTube viewership to its toddler-centric brand, BabyFirst TV, had dropped between 30 and 40 percent. “It was very clear that they did something,” says Arik Kerman, First’s executive vp programming and digital. He’s referring to YouTube, which he believes made changes to its algorithm that caused the decline in BabyFirst video views. “Honestly, it’s very frustrating. We’re now trying to understand what the new rules are.” Indeed, on Aug. 1, YouTube acknowledged to Bloomberg that it had made an algorithm change to boost “quality” family content. Some family-friendly channels got a viewership bump, but BabyFirst — which has 1.5 million subscribers on its main channel, dedicated to teaching children ages 0 to 3 basics like colors and the ABCs — was one of…

Parents often talk about choosing a school to get “the best” for our kids. But what does that “best” mean — and what if it comes at the expense of someone else’s kid? Schools in the U.S. are arguably more segregated now than before the Civil Rights movement. California has the dubious distinction of having the third-most-segregated schools in the nation for black students and the most segregated schools for Latinx students. Children of color are predominantly isolated into schools of poverty, while their white and/or privileged peers enjoy greater access to highly resourced schools. In L.A., schools separated by a mile can have vastly unequal access to resources and opportunities. This means that our individual choices often support a system that further advantages the advantaged. (The very idea of…

At just 17, Asante Blackk became this year’s youngest Emmy nominee and the ninth youngest ever for his performance as 14-year-old Kevin Richardson on Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us. But Blackk first auditioned for another role: Korey Wise, played by fellow first-time nominee Jharrel Jerome. “The entire time I’m auditioning for Korey,” Blackk tells THR. “At that time, they were thinking it would be like everyone else, an actor playing younger and [another playing the character] older.” When DuVernay’s team alerted Blackk that she wanted to see him audition for Richardson, Blackk admits, “I was super confused. But I knew I had to put everything I’ve got on this tape.” (Jerome ultimately played Wise as a teen and an adult — the only actor among the series’ five core…

DANIEL FIENBERG In a way, TV this summer began with the series finale of Game of Thrones, in which an adventure involving highprofile casualties, city-destroying dragons and epic military campaigns climaxed with a coronation for an eccentric, thoroughly disconnected character the series creators felt “had the best story.” It’s no wonder one of the summer’s breakout characters is Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. There’s a way to view the recent small-screen slate as analogous to the bulging Democratic field: There are intriguing upstarts, old favorites and a few spectacular underdogs. Tim, did I just impose too much subtext on what was once a season dedicated to programming escapism? TIM GOODMAN I would argue that summer escapism has been a myth when it comes to television ever since cable got great.…

HONG KONG ACADEMY FOR PERFORMING ARTS SCHOOL OF FILM AND TELEVISION The school is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year and also saw the appointment of a new deputy director, Gillian Choa, who was previously the dean of Hong Kong’s School of Theatre and Entertainment Arts. AUSTRALIAN FILM, TELEVISION AND RADIO SCHOOL Building on its close relationship with the Australian industry, AFTRS has introduced a new master of arts screen course that is open to both international and local students and covers 10 disciplines, including animation, directing and screenwriting. BEIJING FILM ACADEMY BFA now has an undergraduate film production program taught entirely in English. A new summer camp program co-hosted with the New York Film Academy will help emerging filmmaking voices forge international ties. CENTRO DE CAPACITACIÓN CINEMATOGRÁFICA When the…

L.A. CAL STATE LOS ANGELES The East Los Angeles school offers both undergraduate degrees and MFAs in television and film production and writing. The low price tag — $8,000 — means there might even be money left over for a first feature. L.A. FILM SCHOOL Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the for-profit college offers associates and bachelors degrees out of its campus on Sunset Boulevard as well as online degrees in digital filmmaking and animation. The school has awarded $1.5 million to female students with its Women in Entertainment scholarship. PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY The film studies program in Malibu offers majors and minors as well as an MFA in Writing for Screen and Television. Courses range from cinematography and editing to Japanese film and Italian neorealism. STUDIO SCHOOL The 5-year-old for-profit (formerly…

Deal of the Week With a game-changing franchise behind them and another that might keep them busy for the next six years, Game of Thrones turned Star Wars maestros David Benioff and Dan Weiss have signed a five-year, $250 million overall deal with Netflix that has been met with envy and a bit of head-scratching. The biggest TV overalls have gone to prolific showrunners like Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy and Greg Berlanti, who juggle writing with overseeing other creators on multiple programs. Benioff and Weiss, both 48, have focused exclusively on one project and effectively made just 73 episodes of TV. (They wouldn’t even start on Star Wars for Disney until Thrones was finished.) In contrast, Netflix-based Rhimes (four years, $100 million-plus) has eight projects in the works halfway into…

Peak summer travel season has arrived in Beverly Hills, usually a prime time for tourists from China and the Gulf. But hospitality and shopping destinations are seeing notably fewer Ferraris with Arabic plates cruise Rodeo Drive as many well-heeled travelers bypass Los Angeles. At the same time, Chinese travelers to the U.S. dropped for the first time in 15 years, by 5.7 percent in 2018, according to the International Trade Administration. Blame it on the strong U.S. economy offering less international bang for the buck; trade war-induced propaganda, with China issuing U.S. travel alerts warning of shootings and robberies; and Trump administration visa restrictions. It all adds up to a notable decline in the flow of jet-setters who keep Beverly Hills’ chic boutiques humming. (L.A.’s Tourism & Convention Board reports…

Billboard & THR Pride Summit West Hollywood, Aug. 8 The Angry Birds Movie 2 Los Angeles, Aug. 10 AAFCA TV Honors Marina del Rey, Aug. 11 Ping Pong 4 Purpose Los Angeles, Aug. 8…

‘I Recognize That Monkey!’: Marcel Makes Her FX Debut While FX CEO John Landgraf was reviewing dailies of the adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man, he instantly knew one of the actors from his days as an NBC exec during the Friends era. “I recognize that monkey!” he recalled at the FX summer TCA press tour party, referring to the capuchin monkey known as Marcel, sidekick to David Schwimmer’s Ross Geller. Turns out, Landgraf was right: Katie the Monkey worked on both series (changing her gender for each role) and is in her mid-to-late 20s, with plenty of career left (a capuchin’s life span is 35 to 40 years). But there’s a hitch. Since Katie filmed the pilot, Y showrunners Aida Croal and Michael Green were replaced…

Disney’s upcoming streaming service will “be treated as the most important product that the company has launched” during his 14-year tenure, crowed CEO Bob Iger during an Aug. 6 call with Wall Street analysts. It’s a bold proclamation, and it comes with major repercussions. It’s also the closest Iger has come to publicly declaring an all-out war with Netflix. That same day, Iger said Disney+, set to launch Nov. 12, will be bundled with ESPN+ and Hulu, which Disney controls, for a mere $12.99, about what most Netflix subscribers pay for that singular service. Such a low price not only sets the stage for a battle with streamers but also with cable and satellite TV bundlers — a potentially awkward position given that Disney’s Media Networks division, made up of…

For entertainment industry folks of means, private schooling to the tune of $40,000 a year can seem like a de rigueur choice. “My wife works in the film business and she’s often in a room where no one except her sends their kids to public school,” a Los Angeles teacher tells THR. Even in the wake of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, a number of education consultants say it’s business as usual as Hollywood families keep kids on the private-school track, in hopes of procuring an elite college education (especially in the Ivy League, where acceptance rates run from 4.5 percent at Harvard to 10.6 percent at Cornell). But there may be a shift going on. Since March, when the federal college-bribery investigation broke, “parents have awakened to the legal…

As Disney goes, the rest of the industry typically follows. So it should cause alarm among producers given that the studio has slashed its roster of film producers with first-look deals from 24 at the height of such deals in 2003 down to a current seven. Sony also has trimmed the fat, moving from 29 in 2003 to eight now. Though Warner Bros., Paramount and Fox have held steady (the latter now under Disney’s domain), their lineups are expected to dwindle in the future, particularly Fox’s, as deals expire. Universal is the only outlier, with the same number of deals now that it had in place in 2003. Here are some of the producers who can still call a major studio a home.…

Mark Cendrowski’s second Emmy nomination comes with a lot of weight attached to it. The go-to director of CBS’ The Big Bang Theory (he helmed 244 out of its 280 episodes) boasts one of only three nominations (including editing and technical direction) that the long-running nerdy comedy earned for its 12th and final season. The series signed off May 16 as the No. 1 scripted comedy in the adults 18-to-49 demographic and as TV’s longest-running multicamera comedy ever (besting Cheers). Cendrowski earned his first Emmy nom in 2018 in an unusual fashion: Seven hours after the nominations were announced, the TV Academy revealed he’d been left off the list because a new rule requiring that at least one multicamera director be included in the category was overlooked. For the second…

In the years The Hollywood Reporter has been ranking film schools — this is the eighth list, determined by extensive interviewing and research (see methodology in “How It’s Done,” page 96) — the magazine has never received a straight answer to one very straight-forward question: What is the purpose of film school? Pretty much every institution on this list sees it differently. For some, like No. 6 Wesleyan (up from No. 9 last year), where modern film studies was all but invented in the 1960s (by cinema scholar Jeanine Basinger, who’s getting her own building on the campus next year), it’s all about history, subtext and auteur theory. For others, the focus is hands-on experience, providing students with access to everything from old-fashioned 16mm cameras to state-of-the-art 3D VR labs…

This fall, Susan Ruskin takes over as dean of AFI, the conservatory’s third in two years. Fortunately for her, she has a lot of experience — in both academia (she was dean of UNC School of the Arts’ film school) and in the industry (she’s produced such movies as Anaconda and Haunted Honeymoon and worked for Gene Wilder and Lucasfilm) — which should help her deal with turbulent times up in the hills of Griffith Park. Do you know why your predecessor, Richard Gladstein, left after only 18 months? I do not. I do not know. I do not have the history. What I do know is there has been a lot of change, and I hope I can bring stability. How will you create that stability? You just have…

In its review of Good Boys, set for an Aug. 16 release, THR says director Gene Stupnitsky “has an endless fascination with hearing preteens curse.” Maybe what worked for The Bad News Bears in 1976 might work again four decades later. Back then, THR noted Bears’ “sharp, salty screenplay,” which featured kid Tatum O’Neal, fresh off her supporting actress Oscar victory for Paper Moon, saying such lines as, “You handled it like shit!” The plot centered on an alcoholic former minor leaguer (Walter Matthau) coaching a San Fernando Valley Little League team full of misfits. O’Neal, who portrayed the star pitcher, says one of the movie’s pluses was that it “took girls out of the girlie position and put them more in with the boys.” (Among the other Bears was…