Innholdsfortegnelse for Wednesday, November 20, 2019 i The Hollywood Reporter

The move by the Department of Justice to seek the elimination of the Paramount Consent Decrees is not the end of the story. First up, the DOJ will need to convince a federal judge that the long-standing prohibition on movie distributors owning major theatrical exhibitors “no longer meet[s] consumer interest,” as DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim put it in his Nov. 19 announcement. This will likely mean responding in court to the dozens of comments the DOJ received in reaction to its multiyear review on the conditions put in place after Hollywood studios lost a huge 1948 Supreme Court decision. Many independent theaters have expressed concern that the end of the Paramount Decrees would lead to studios again flexing their might with licensing demands like bundling and geographic exclusivity. Larger…

Elvis Wasn’t Available … But James Dean Was James Dean’s return from the grave — as a CGI character in the upcoming Vietnam drama Finding Jack — doesn’t have a lot of breathing stars cheering (“This is awful,” Chris Evans tweeted about the resurrection). But if the film’s directors had their way, they’d have dug up an even more iconic figure to play an Army unit leader in their $40 million film: Elvis Presley. Anton Ernst and Tati Golykh originally had their eyes on the King but were turned down by his estate. Meanwhile, Dean’s role in the film, though substantial, isn’t the lead; that part — a soldier searching for his dog, Jack — will be played by a yet-uncast living actor. Given the blowback over exhuming a legend,…

As many within NBCUniversal obsess over the particulars of Peacock, the company’s forthcoming streaming service, Lisa Katz and Tracey Pakosta are tasked with keeping the company’s long-standing broadcast network afloat. Their business can feel antiquated — particularly in a marketplace with some 500 rival shows, many of them at sexier, freer-spending outlets, from HBO to Apple — until Katz and Pakosta’s biggest hits are taken into account: This Is Us and Dick Wolf’s Chicago franchise still draw upward of 10 million viewers, and that’s before the series’ online and less-urgent linear viewership gets tallied. But NBC’s co-presidents of scripted programming of nearly two years, who report to Entertainment chairman Paul Telegdy and oversee 40 employees, are chasing a moving goalpost — one that demands both linear and digital success in…

In the past seven years, seven high-profile movies about slavery have been released, the most recent being Harriet, chronicling the extraordinary life of slave liberator Harriet Tubman. The others are The Birth of a Nation (2016), Free State of Jones (2016), Freedom (2014), 12 Years a Slave (2013), Django Unchained (2012) and Lincoln (2012). I’m conflicted over this abundance of cultural sensitivity because, while there’s enormous good that comes from it, there’s also the usual threat of knee-jerk backlash that can set back African Americans. On the one hand, these films are necessary to correct the misperceptions many Americans have about slavery as a result of inaccurate school textbooks, ill-informed teachers and conservative propaganda. Because many of them are prestigious enough to garner critical acclaim (12 Years a Slave alone…

Holiday season is primetime for wine gifts, and the first rule of thumb is to do a little research. Make sure the recipient even drinks alcohol — “I once gave a British executive a very nice bottle of Petrus without realizing he was a recovering alcoholic. He auctioned it off for charity,” says So You Think You Can Dance? and American Idol executive producer Nigel Lythgoe. Then find out his or her preference for a varietal or region or if the person has a penchant for trendy pét-nat sparkling and other natural wines. “You should establish whether the person is at least an Old or New World drinker. That’s a big divide,” says author and wine columnist Jay McInerney. A good Hollywood assistant should be able to research anything, but…

The father-son dynamic as a storytelling device is nearly as old as storytelling itself, but it continues to be one of the most powerful. Take, for example, Homer’s The Odyssey. Its epic story, which centers on Odysseus’ 20-year journey away from his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, was written in the 8th century B.C. But the central theme of that tale — a father determined to get home to his son — remains so relevant that it was a key point of inspiration for James Gray as he was writing Ad Astra, his September space epic. “I thought, ‘What if the focus was on Telemachus’ point of view, where the father had gone away for 20 years and Telemachus went to search for his father?’ ” Gray says of his…

As the streaming wars go global, the battle for the hearts, minds — and wallets — of the vast Asian market very well could be decided in Southeast Asia. With China a nonfactor since all Western platforms are blocked in the country, the race is on to establish a foothold in a rapidly maturing market that boasts a population of 600 million. The numbers underscore the region’s potential: In its most recent annual forecast, Media Partners Asia put online video revenue in Southeast Asia this year at $27 billion, a rise of 24 percent year-over-year, while predicting it would top $50 billion by 2024. That’s why all eyes are on Singapore. In terms of size (247 square miles) and population (5.8 million), the city is dwarfed by near neighbors like…

While there’s a chance that playing Mr. Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood might bring Tom Hanks his fifth Oscar nomination, it was the 1980 lowbudget film He Knows You’re Alone that got him his SAG card and the 1982 TV movie Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters that gave him his first lead. (Jaffe wrote the novel on which the telefilm was based, and her contract stipulated that her name be above the title.) Alone was not a film Mr. Rogers would approve of. It fit squarely in the horror genre that’s been called “hack and stab” — involving dead teenagers and a lot of splatter. The Hollywood Reporter said MGM should be ashamed of itself because “rarely has such shoddy merchandise been offered by a major studio.”…

Here’s a prediction: A few years from now, Taylor Swift’s Nov. 24 performance at the American Music Awards will be largely forgotten. But the discussion about this performance will reverberate for far longer than most observers expect. The debate started with a Nov. 14 tweet from Swift, who called out Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta for allegedly restricting her from performing old songs at the ABC event honoring her as Artist of the Decade. According to Swift, the two men only would permit her to perform “Shake It Off” and other early hits if she agreed not to later rerecord copycat versions, as she’s been threatening since Braun in June acquired rights to her Big Machine recordings. Big Machine denied such a move. It’s conceivable each side was telling a…

BEST PICTURE Joker Todd Phillips’ Warner Bros. pic became the first R-rated film to cross $1 billion worldwide. On Nov. 16, it also won cinematography fest Camerimage’s top prize and screened at the White House. The Good Liar Warners’ crime thriller starring Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen opened with $5.6 million but seems to resonate more with audiences (86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) than critics (just 64 percent). Ford v Ferrari Not only did Fox’s James Mangold racing drama zoom to the top of the U.S. box office with $31 million, it landed a rare A+ CinemaScore (just like Green Book), an important Oscar indicator. BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Queen & Slim Lena Waithe Universal’s Melina Matsoukas film is at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes after opening the 33rd AFI Fest…

Big Deal AT&T has called “no whammies” on Game Show Network. The telecom giant has sold its 42 percent stake in the cabler to Sony Pictures Entertainment, which now wholly owns GSN. The deal valued AT&T’s share at $380 million, with Sony also paying a dividend of about $130 million. In addition to airing classic and new episodes of game shows, GSN has an online and mobile gaming business. As part of the deal, GSN will continue to be carried on AT&T-owned DirecTV. The pact comes as the company has been divesting “non-strategic assets” as it seeks to de-leverage and pay down debt, and as it faces activist investor pressure from Elliott Management, which has pressed the company to offload some of its assets, most notably DirecTV. In October, Elliott…

Cenk Uygur is itching for a fight. “I say to the Democratic voters of the 25th district: Let me at ’em. Do you want someone who’s going to be polite to the Republicans or do you want someone who’s going to rip their face off?” Uygur told THR on Nov. 16, three days after announcing he’s joining the race to fill the House seat vacated by Katie Hill amid sexual-misconduct allegations. Uygur’s candidacy — he’s the co-founder of the liberal news site The Young Turks (TYT) and a former MSNBC host — all but guarantees that the race in the swing 25th District, which includes the Hollywood-adjacent Santa Clarita and Simi Valley, will be a media circus. Former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who served time in prison for lying…

There’s a joke circulating these days, and it isn’t particularly funny: Millions of people are ditching cable because the bill is too high and no one can watch all that programming. But then everyone is signing up for one pricey digital TV app after another. The punchline is that the future of TV doesn’t look particularly different from the past. There’s some truth to that, and there’s a new power dynamic in play at the dawn of the streaming era that could make the future of TV both very different from and very similar to the television industry of the past. For years, TV broadcasters enjoyed most of the leverage in so-called “carriage” negotiations, able to extract ever-increasing sums of money from cable companies like Comcast and satellite operators like…

There was one challenge in making director James Mangold’s racing drama Ford v Ferrari that supervising sound editor Don Sylvester says kept him up at night. “I knew we had to get the real Ford GT40,” says Sylvester of securing the sound of the car that’s central to the film about racing pioneers Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale). I was afraid if we got [the sound] from a bad library, someone would call and say, ‘You failed. This is not what the car sounded like.’ That fear was with me from the very beginning.” While the team was able to locate a few original Ford GT40s, convincing their owners to hand over their treasured vehicles to a sound team proved nearly impossible. “They are probably worth…

“Tom just landed on the roof,” jokes Emma Tillinger Koskoff about amateur airman Tom Cruise as THR’s Producer Roundtable is interrupted by the sound of a circling helicopter outside. Tillinger Koskoff, 47, who produced Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Todd Phillips’ Joker, is used to a few shooting hurdles along the way to a hit. She joined David Heyman, 58 (Marriage Story, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Peter Chernin, 68 (Ford v Ferrari), Debra Martin Chase, 63 (Harriet), Dan Lin, 46 (The Two Popes) and Charlize Theron, 44 (Bombshell), for an hourlong discussion in October, when they shared plenty of trade secrets of working with demanding directors, remaining agile in an ever-changing industry and knowing when to fight to the finish for a movie. Said Theron: “Pure panic is…

The story of how Tom Hanks came to play Fred Rogers, the most beloved children’s entertainer of all time, begins, fittingly enough, at a child’s birthday party. In November 2015, director Marielle Heller was sipping lemonade in actor Colin Hanks’ backyard, celebrating his daughter’s birthday, when Colin’s famous dad struck up a conversation. “He mentioned an article I was featured in,” recalls Heller, referring to a New York Times Magazine story about female filmmakers. “But he didn’t know I was featured in it.” The elder Hanks later sought out Heller’s 2015 indie comedy The Diary of a Teenage Girl, starring Bel Powley and Kristen Wiig, and was so impressed that he arranged a meeting with her. The two became friends, and Hanks would email Heller as she worked on Can…

Since January, more than 750 movies have debuted at the domestic box office, while in November alone, some 50 new television shows appeared, boosted by the launches of Apple TV+ and Disney+. Consumers have more options than ever before, making the job of Hollywood’s marketers all the more indispensable. For its list of top entertainment creatives, THR sought out those executives who helped their programming stand out from the noise. Among the masterminds are Disney’s Joe Earley, who launched a marketing onslaught that led to 10 million Disney+ launch-day signups; WarnerMedia Entertainment’s Chris Spadaccini, who turned the final season of Game of Thrones into a multi-week event; and Blair Rich, the veteran Warner Bros. marketer who stood her ground with Todd Phillips’ controversial Joker and reaped a $1 billion-plus reward…

The Districts (DECKLE EDGE, OCT. 1) BY Johnny Dwyer AGENCY WME Dwyer’s deep dive into the dramatic efforts of the federal courts tasked with administering justice in New York City could lend itself to an episodic series that can toe the line between popular true-crime docuseries and Dick Wolf-produced procedurals. Revelation (SHE WRITES PRESS, NOV. 5) BY Bobi Gentry Goodwin AGENCY The Unter Agency After a CPS worker in San Francisco sees a picture of her father in the apartment of a young boy she is doing a welfare check on, she turns to her estranged siblings and God to uncover the truth. The debut novel could be fodder for a faith-based project.…

SHOPPING END OF AN ERA Sarah Jessica Parker once said, “If you work hard and are a good person, you deserve to shop at Barneys.” I couldn’t agree more. But as early as February, Barneys New York, its assets sold to liquidators, will close its doors, leaving many people in town upset. “I’m definitely in mourning. It feels like a death in the family,” says talent manager Joanna Horowitz. “No other store was as hip and trendy.” Since I can remember, I’ve been shopping at Barneys in Manhattan and, later, in Beverly Hills, where it opened in 1994. It was not just a store. It was like a playground for adults, a favorite place to hang out, run into people, enjoy the legendary Christmas windows, and attend events and trunk…

Weddings Anna Berthold, a motion picture literary agent at UTA, married Jessica Zuk, a senior marketing manager at the Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air, on Oct. 18 at La Quinta Country Club. The newlyweds honeymooned in Los Cabos, Mexico. Tammy Levine, marketing manager at an L.A.-based financial advisory firm, married Kit Haines, accounting manager at Lionsgate, in front of 100 guests at La Cumbre Country Club in Santa Barbara on Oct. 12. The couple honeymooned on the Cook Islands. Shabnam Mogharabi, co-founder and GM of SoulPancake, a division of Participant, married Toufan Rahimpour, senior vp operations at Litify, a software startup that builds platforms for law firms, on Oct. 19 at Wilson Creek Winery in Temecula, California, in front of 230 guests. The wedding was officiated by SoulPancake co-founder…

Would you be more or less likely to buy a subscription to a streaming service if it included the option to bundle different services under one account? 24% MUCH MORE LIKELY TO PURCHASE 33% SOMEWHAT MORE LIKELY TO PURCHASE 11% NOT VERY LIKELY TO PURCHASE 13% NOT AT ALL LIKELY TO PURCHASE Source: THR/Morning Consult poll conducted Oct. 24-28 among a nationally representative sample of 2,329 adults; percentages don't necessarily add up to 100.…

Judy Star Wars Booksmart A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Ford v Ferrari Rocketman Little Women Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…

In April, a pair of Spotify executives traveled to Washington, D.C., on a high-stakes mission to land two sought-after producers. Barack and Michelle Obama, enjoying their post-White House status as cultural uber influencers, already had struck a deal with Netflix to produce consequential film and TV projects. They were looking to make a splash with audio, too. Content chief Dawn Ostroff and head of studios Courtney Holt already had met with the team at Higher Ground, the Obamas’ production company, to share their podcasting tips. Now they were preparing to pitch the former first couple to explain why they should be making podcasts for Spotify, which after 13 years of music streaming needed to diversify its business — or risk being overtaken by much larger rivals-in-audio Apple and Amazon. Exclusive…

FORD V FERRARI JAMES MANGOLD “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — for the ease of the male relationships and the spectacular staging work of [director] George Roy Hill, who found both drama and humor, dramatized a great friendship and also staged action without it feeling too designed with previsualization. Obviously, other racing films were of assistance — some more as cautionary examples, things to avoid. Others, like Grand Prix and Le Mans [acted] as singular examples of the period style of analog shooting we wanted to emulate.” JOJO RABBIT TAIKA WAITITI “The films I would reference are things like Life Is Beautiful. I remember that sort of playfulness — Harvey, with James Stewart, who saw this imaginary rabbit friend. And also, in a sense, Dr. Strangelove, but not quite.…

If you see a TV critic walking down the street, lurching gait and deadened eyes, given them a wide berth. And perhaps congratulate them on being able to leave the house at all. With the release of Apple TV+ and Disney+, November has marked another milestone in the ongoing programming oversaturation that, at this point, shows no sign of abating. FX boss John Landgraf’s 2015 pronouncement about the arrival of “Peak TV” is kind of like if Henry Ford had declared in 1908 that we had reached “Peak Car.” Peak TV already reflected a shift in emphasis toward quantity and away from the quality designated by TV’s various “Golden Ages.” So maybe we need a new term to refer to what happens when we go past the peak and an…

OVER THE TOP IN CHINA The Asian TV Forum & Market goes big from the opening keynote address with Gong Yu, founder of Chinese streaming giant iQiYi, who will discuss the OTT landscape in a talk titled “Streaming the Future.” Gong’s video platform launched in 2010 and now boasts more than 500 million monthly users while tapping into licensing deals with Netflix and expanding into mobile content. Dec. 3, 10 a.m.-10:40 a.m. LEADER OF THE APAC Gong’s address opens up an ATF “Leaders Summit” that includes the first public remarks from Giorgio Stock, WarnerMedia Entertainment Networks’ freshly minted president, distribution and advertising sales, EMEA and APAC. The hope is that Stock will reveal what WarnerMedia has in store for Asia just as the region’s streaming battle really begins to heat…