Innholdsfortegnelse for Emmy Special Issue 21B June 2019 i The Hollywood Reporter

This Emmy season, Netflix has the best sort of problem a TV platform can have: It has so many high-caliber and popular shows, it boasts one serious contender in nearly every category and, in some categories, so many that they could end up boxing out one another. This is the result of Netflix’s multibillion-dollar investment in original content — it planned 700 original shows for 2018 — as it strives to fortify itself against the progression of existing competitors (like Amazon and Hulu) and rise of new ones (Disney+ and Apple). Netflix is still seeking its first drama, comedy or limited series Emmy victory — and this year it will have a lot of shots. Among comedies, it has past nominees GLOW, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Arrested Development and formidable…

You think you obsessively check for signs of aging? Michael Marino does it for a living, and not just on his own face. “I’m always looking at how a person’s face moves and wrinkles,” says the prosthetic makeup designer. For Marino, hunting for neck creases and droopy eyelids on Hollywood stars is a critical part of his job. “I can’t just make up wrinkles,” he says, explaining that the best results in prosthetic makeup are achieved when the pieces follow the path of an actor’s own creases. “Their face is driving the whole makeup.” For season three of HBO’s True Detective, Marino, along with head of makeup John Blake and head of hair Brian Badie, was tasked with taking Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff through storylines that alternated from 1980…

THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL “We’re going to the Catskills!” exclaims Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) in season two of Amazon’s period comedy, which travels back to a time when New Yorkers spent the summer flocking to the mountains north of the city. “We did a lot of research. There are many books written about this time in the Catskills. It was a big part of New York life,” says production designer Bill Groom. The second season sees Midge and her family travel to the Catskills for their summer vacation. At the resort, their days are packed with activities, trips to the beauty parlor and evening get-togethers. Midge also spends her time navigating her separation from her husband (Michael Zegen) while also getting to know a new love interest, Dr. Benjamin Ettenberg…

The series finale of Game of Thrones inspired much debate over the proper way to end a beloved TV show. Few could argue that an earlier HBO drama, Six Feet Under, didn’t stick the landing. “Everyone’s Waiting” first aired Aug. 21, 2005, and was written and directed by Six Feet creator Alan Ball. He opted to break with tradition and open the show not with a death, but a birth — of a baby daughter to Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) and Nate Fisher (Peter Krause), who had died of a brain hemorrhage in the third-to-last episode. And Ball ended it with a six-and-a-half-minute flash-forward montage set to the song “Breathe Me” by a still-under-the-radar Sia. As Claire (Lauren Ambrose) sets out from L.A. to begin a new life in New York,…

Having background actors from New York made it easier to use shorthand when building the authentic city style in Netflix’s Russian Doll. “We did give notes along the lines of ‘Dress for a Bushwick loft party opening, PS1 MoMA event’ with very specific New York art scene references,” says designer Jennifer Rogien of the hip, red-tinted aesthetic of Nadia’s (Natasha Lyonne) birthday party. Since Rogien lives in New York, she was able to absorb the look of the city on a daily basis to envision the wardrobe of Nadia, who dies and relives the same day over and over. “She’s a New York woman. She’s not in a car. She isn’t a fashion chaser,” Rogien says. “She lives on the Lower East Side. She’s lived there forever. She’s sort of…

Viewers got the opportunity to see some of nature’s most majestic and unique creatures up close in two recent documentary series — Netflix’s Our Planet and National Geographic’s Hostile Planet — but for the cinematographers working on these projects, capturing these animals on film often put them in the path of danger. Not only did they have to find creative ways to film these creatures, they also had to take as much care as possible to protect themselves from harm. So, safety was a big consideration as a team of cinematographers from the eight-part Our Planet planned to film gray reef sharks in French Polynesia. “We wanted the most immersive [feeling] but the sharks were biting each other, so we had to assume we’d get bit,” says Doug Anderson, a…

GOOD OMENS For Netflix’s six-part miniseries that follows an angel (Michael Sheen) and demon (David Tennant) who join forces to prevent the coming of the apocalypse, London-based VFX house Milk created 650 VFX shots. Character work included the creation of a vicious hellhound that started with photographing a carefully selected Great Dane then replacing the head and neck in CG. “To really get the level of muscle movement, we want to keep it real, and we matched the movement of the neck,” says VFX supervisor Jean-Claude Deguara, a co-founder of Milk. “We really emphasized the teeth and the eyes and a lot of scarring and pointed ears. But we wanted to still keep it feeling like a real dog.” Once they had the performance of the dog, they shot another…

When you’re making live TV, there are no second chances. “There are always things that come up that are unexpected. You have to handle that and move on,” says audio mixer Mark Young. “Every live musical that I have done brings its own challenges.” That was certainly the case in January when he worked on Fox’s Rent: Live, based on the 1996 Tony-winning musical about a group of young artists in the East Village. After Brennin Hunt, who played Roger, broke his foot during a dress rehearsal the day before the broadcast, Fox chose to air the dress rehearsal as performed in front of a Fox Studios audience, and only the last act was performed live, with Hunt in a wheelchair. “It’s stressful,” Young admits. “But on the other hand,…

Michael B. Jordan has become a household name by playing larger-than-life heroes and villains like Adonis Johnson in Creed and Killmonger in Marvel’s Black Panther. But behind the scenes, Jordan plays a different kind of hero, one who uses the projects he makes, as both a producer and an actor, to create equal opportunities for marginalized communities in the entertainment industry. Through his production company, Outlier Society, which he founded in 2016, Jordan, 32, is backing a range of inclusive stories centered on standout characters, including a superpowered black youth in Raising Dion; a civil rights lawyer attempting to free death row inmates in Just Mercy; and a man who clings to life after losing half his body fighting to protect his city in gen:LOCK. An animated series (which debuted…

When Rent opened on Broadway in 1996, Angela Wendt had to design 68 costumes for its 15 main characters, all starving artists in New York’s East Village in the early ’90s. But for Fox’s Rent: Live, for which she, original director Michael Greif and a few other longtime members of the Rent family translated the late Jonathan Larson’s musical into an immersive TV experience, there were 240 looks to prepare between November, when production began in earnest, and late January, when the show was set to air. While an accident forced Fox to air the dress rehearsal footage instead of the live performance, Wendt’s work was still on full display on the 30 castmembers — 14 dancers, eight ensemble members and eight principals. She spoke to THR about her process…

Catch-22 Cinematographer Martin Ruhe’s work on the Hulu miniseries, lensed in Italy and based on Joseph Heller’s 1961 satirical novel set during World War II, started with reviewing period newsreel footage with producers and directors George Clooney and Grant Heslov. “It was clear that Catch — with its range from absurd comedy and satire to really touching and shocking drama — needed different ways to get to you,” says Ruhe, who shot the series with an Arri Alexa Mini. “Our work on the ground is accompanying [protagonist] Yossarian, often in fluent moves with a lot of Steadicam use. In some of the absurd dialogues, we are more classic and let the comedy play out. When the soldiers are on their missions, it is chaotic, [so we used] handheld very close…

Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us relates the true story of the five young men falsely accused and found guilty of a crime they did not commit in 1989, the Central Park jogger rape. Divided into four parts, the Netflix limited series, which premiered May 31, captures the unjust treatment they faced at the hands of the criminal justice system and the toll it took on them and their families. Two editors who worked on the drama, Terilyn Shropshire and Michelle Tesoro, spoke to THR about how they tied together the boys’ journeys from childhood to adulthood and the ultimate goal of honoring the realities of their stories. What approach did you discuss with Ava as you started the production? TERILYN SHROPSHIRE In Part One, we want you to see…

Catch-22 Hulu’s Catch-22 required the sounds of B-25 bombers and German Flak guns. Production obtained four vintage B-25 bombers from collectors, but there was one hitch: Everyone was so enamored with the planes that “nobody was anxious to give us time to record,” says supervising sound editor Jerry Ross, who ended up recording during and between takes. The Flak gun sounds were made from layers of sounds he collected through the years, including from his early films like Apocalypse Now and Another 48 Hrs. He also turned to his fellow sound editors, Oscar winners Gary Rydstrom and Eugene Gearty, who shared their libraries of recordings from Saving Private Ryan and The Aviator. And they tapped into Warner Bros.’ sound effects library, with an end result Ross describes as a “collage…

Janet Mock made history in 2018 as the first transgender woman of color to direct an episode of TV with Pose’s season one standout “Love Is the Message.” This year, Mock — who’s also a writer and producer on the groundbreaking FX drama set in New York City’s 1980s underground ballroom subculture — is back in the director’s chair, helming the third episode of season two, which takes the series into 1990, the year Madonna released her hit single “Vogue.” Though Mock, 36, is comfortable leading a set these days — she has also directed for Netflix’s The Politician — she is constantly thinking of new ways to challenge herself. During the April 24 shoot, for instance, she found herself orchestrating a labyrinthine one-shot of Indya Moore’s character, Angel, entering…