Innholdsfortegnelse for Wednesday, January 8, 2020 i The Hollywood Reporter

On March 1, veteran producer Michael De Luca will take the reins of MGM’s motion picture group as the studio attempts to define its future at a time when mid-budget films have largely fallen by the wayside and merger mania reigns in Hollywood. For the past two years, MGM has been the subject of acquisition rumors thanks to a rich library that includes the James Bond films, Tomb Raider and Legally Blonde. (The Bond films alone would be enough to attract the interest of major studios.) MGM stakeholders believe the company could command up to $10 billion, but it appears that leadership hopes to burnish the asset before undertaking a sale. In the era of media giants locked in streaming wars, MGM stands on its own, highly leveraged and facing…

On Dec. 9, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge took aim at the “content companies” entering the direct-to-consumer streaming business. The cable executive told a roomful of investment bankers in Manhattan that these new streamers are “creating havoc in the ecosystem.” Rutledge wasn’t talking about the proliferation of content or the fight to secure exclusive deals with talent. He was targeting the lax security and rampant password sharing that’s prevalent across the streaming landscape. “Half the people in the country live in houses with two or less people in them, and yet these services have five streams,” Rutledge added. “There are more streams available than there are homes to use them.” Password sharing has serious economic consequences. In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing, and that…

EAST CAPE, BAJA CALIFORNIA At the 141-room Four Seasons Resort Los Cabos at Costa Palmas — open since October on a 2-mile swimmable beach — the Adventure Concierge arranges tours of the UNESCO-listed Cabo Pulmo marine park via a 65-foot Hatteras yacht to see schooling jacks, Mobula rays, sea lions and whales. From $850 a night, fourseasons.com. Whale sharks and manta rays are neighbors of the new Zadún, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, a 115-room property with a massive spa and 6,000-square-foot Grand Reserve Villa. From $799, ritzcarlton.com KADAVU ISLAND GROUP, FIJI Kokomo Private Island Fiji is the closest luxury resort to the wondrous Great Astrolabe Reef. With just 26 spacious villas and residences, guests — along with a staff marine biologist — get coral gardens and caverns virtually to themselves. From…

Kitty Green did not set out to make the first movie about Harvey Weinstein. For her follow-up to Casting JonBenet — a 2017 genre-bender that mixed documentary interviews with re-enactments — the 35-year-old Australian director was developing a project about “consent and power structures on college campuses,” she says. It was Oct. 5, 2017 — just over a year after Stanford undergrad Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in jail for felony sexual assault — and Green was interviewing a group of Stanford students. That’s when she was interrupted by a news alert on her phone — the New York Times story alleging Weinstein’s serial abuse. “A lot of my friends had worked at places like The Weinstein Co. and Miramax and had worked for predatory bosses,”…

KRISTEN DOUTE Instagram followers: 719K Fired from SUR in 2014, Doute, 36, has relaunched fashion line James Mae. Self-help book He’s Making You Crazy, co-written by How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days author Michele Alexander, arrives in June. KATIE MALONEY-SCHWARTZ Instagram followers: 1M Maloney-Schwartz, 32, the latest SUR defector, teamed with Doute and Schroeder for Witches of WeHo, a wine label from actor Stephen Amell’s Nocking Point Wines. TOM SANDOVAL Instagram followers: 887K On top of his investment in TomTom, Sandoval, 36, is plotting a whiskey label after the December release of Fancy AF Cocktails — a mixology guide he wrote with girlfriend Ariana Madix. STASSI SCHROEDER Instagram followers: 1.9M Not above shilling Taco Bell on social media and the first to ditch SUR back in 2013, Schroeder,…

Freeform’s remake of the ’90s Fox drama Party of Five may not be the best in a wave of IP-grabbing updates, but it has an important thing going for it: Unlike so many nostalgiafueled retreads, this show has a justification for offering its new spin on old material, one that leverages the original premise without pandering to the original audience. The creators of the earlier series, Amy Lippman and Christopher Keyser, return for the reboot, joined by pilot co-writer Michal Zebede. The San Francisco-based Salingers have become the Acostas, a comfortable Los Angeles family with a secret. While Javier (Bruno Bichir) and Gloria (Fernanda Urrejola) have carved out a middleclass life for their five children, complete with a successful family restaurant, their arrival in the country was not technically legal…

At he beginning of 2019, Asante Blackk was a 17-year-old high school student at North Point High School in Waldorf, Maryland, without a single TV or film credit to his name. Just one year later, he starts 2020 with two Critics’ Choice Awards nominations (following up an Emmy nomination in the fall) for his performance as Central Park Five member Kevin Richardson in Netflix’s When They See Us and as teenage father Malik in season four of the NBC hit This Is Us. Blackk is one of a mere three actors, alongside Laura Dern and Scarlett Johansson, nominated for multiple projects at the Jan. 12 ceremony at Santa Monica’s Barker Hangar. He recently spoke with THR about his whirlwind year, new opportunities and Training Day dreams. How has it been…

One anniversary that surely won’t be celebrated in Burbank in 2020 is the one that marks 20 years since Warner Bros. merged with America Online. On Jan. 10, 2000, Time Warner — then the home of Warners, HBO, CNN, TBS, Time Warner Cable and Time magazine — was bought for $182 billion by AOL, which had 30 million subscribers using its dial-up service to access the internet and email. The union combined the world’s largest media conglomerate with the world’s largest internet provider. The Hollywood Reporter said the deal created “a $350 billion monolith prominent in virtually every corner of the new and old media universe.” With power like that, what could possibly go wrong? Everything, it turned out. Within a few months, the economy fell into recession, the dot-com…

BEST PICTURE 1917 Sam Mendes’ World War I epic surprised some by winning the Golden Globes for best picture drama and director Jan. 5, ahead of its theatrical expansion. The Two Popes Fernando Meirelles’ Vatican-set drama went 0-for-4 at the Globes and also missed out on WGA and ASC nominations. The Irishman Netflix campaigned hard with dollars and talent for Martin Scorsese’s mob saga, but the movie and its stars lost five times at the Globes. BEST ACTOR Taron Egerton Rocketman The biggest upset of the Globes was this Brit’s triumph over Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Dolemite Is My Name’s Eddie Murphy. BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Jennifer Lopez Hustlers The HFPA loves stars, and few are bigger than J.Lo, so her Globes loss to Laura Dern…

In Just Mercy, when attorney Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) arrives in Monroeville, Alabama, to take the case of a wrongly convicted black man, Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), the local white officials who stymie his every move toward justice keep proudly asking him if he’s visited the To Kill a Mockingbird museum, since this is the town where the story is set. No one seems aware of the irony of championing a story that attacks racism while they are fiercely committed to furthering it. That discordant motif establishes the real conflict in this and other legal dramas about racism (Marshall, Ghosts of Mississippi, Amistad, A Soldier’s Story): Movies extolling racial tolerance are dusty museum relics that exonerate us from the responsibility of fighting current injustice. Movies about racial injustice can…

What Jay Roach Really Wants to Do Is Direct … a Musical Jay Roach has a secret project up his sleeve, and it’s got nothing to do with politics. The 62-year-old Bombshell director — whose previous ripped-from-the-headlines films include Recount and Game Change — tells Rambling Reporter that he’s been quietly at work on, of all things, a Busby Berkeley-style musical. “I want to do an epic spectacle-oriented comedy-musical,” he says. He won’t reveal details, other than that he’s writing it himself, but his dance card is pretty full these days: He’s got about a dozen projects in various stages of development, including 67 Shots, a drama about the shootings at Kent State in 1970. Still, he sounds determined. “It’s my moonlighting job,” he says. “I’ll be chirping away and…

Pat Kingsley is a legend in the world of personal publicity, but to Jennifer Allen and Melissa Kates, their PMK boss was a mentor, trusted confidante and, as she remains to this day, a friend. So, in December 2009 when Kingsley left as PMK/HBH merged with rival BNC, Allen and Kates did something that was years away from becoming trendy: They struck out on their own to launch a talent PR firm. Without telling friends, family or even such clients as Jodie Foster, Molly Shannon or Matt Damon (at first), they opened shop, eventually bringing nearly 35 clients apiece to the new firm. The past decade, the company they called Viewpoint has expanded with offices in L.A. and New York, and the duo employ 22 staffers, most of them female.…

Out of the 1,900 visual effects shots in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker that included epic lightsaber battles, hyperspeeds in space, undiscovered worlds and new creatures, it was the delicate work on the scenes with the late Carrie Fisher’s Leia Organa that proved the most challenging. To feature Fisher, who died from complications of a heart attack in December 2016 at age 60, in The Rise of Skywalker — the ninth installment of the saga that began with George Lucas’ A New Hope in 1977 — meant that director J.J. Abrams and the Disney-Lucasfilm team had to go back to the cuttingroom floor. VFX supervisor Roger Guyett of Industrial Light & Magic explains that the team started by finding outtakes of Fisher, shot during the making of 2015’s The…

Marcia Clark became a household name after her televised prosecution of O.J. Simpson in 1995. While Harvey Weinstein won’t receive the same wall-to-wall cable coverage, in the social media age his upcoming trial could similarly boost the profile of Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon. A lifelong Staten Islander, middle child and Catholic school alumnus, the 57-year-old career prosecutor has worked in the DA’s office since graduating from St. John’s University School of Law in 1988 — excluding a brief hiatus in 2015 when she unsuccessfully ran for district attorney in her home borough. (Though she ran as a Republican, Illuzzi-Orbon was endorsed by both the Democratic-leaning New York Daily News and the Rupert Murdoch-controlled New York Post as well as several organizations and individuals on both sides of the…

On the first day of production on The Farewell, a very special visitor rolled onto the set in a motorized wheelchair. It was director Lulu Wang’s nai nai — Mandarin for paternal grandmother — who spent that June day in 2018 watching Wang film in an apartment complex in the northeast Chinese city of Changchun. She had no idea that the movie being made in front of her was the story of her own impending death. It’s a complicated and twisty tale, but as the tagline of the film — “based on an actual lie” — clearly suggests, The Farewell is in no small part autobiographical. Back in 2013, when Wang’s family learned that their beloved matriarch had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, they decided to keep the truth from her…

Taylor Russell, the breakout star of Trey Edward Schults’ family drama Waves, was so intent on connecting with her cast — including Lucas Hedges, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Sterling K. Brown — that she asked them for childhood photos. “How can you not love somebody if you see them as a child?” asks the 25-year-old actress, who, as Emily, longs to make a more intimate connection with her father and brother, and eventually grapples with a violent tragedy that strikes the family. Set to receive the Virtuosos Award on Jan. 18 at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, the Canadian actress spoke with THR about the film’s deeply collaborative process, her preparation for the role and some of the other breakout performances she’s admired this year. So, your involvement in…

Thomas Burman has met many monsters over his career. Of course, he’s often the one who created them. The pioneering artist, who will receive a lifetime achievement award from the Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild (MUAHSG) on Jan. 11, is credited with coining the term “special makeup effects.” His work spans films such as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Teen Wolf and TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Nip/Tuck, earning him seven Emmys and one Oscar nom. Burman, the son of a prop maker, began his career in 1966 when he apprenticed with Ben Nye at 20th Century Fox Studios, becoming an assistant to John Chambers on 1968’s Planet of the Apes. Later, he joined his brother Ellis “Sonny” Burman Jr. and Chambers to start what has…

After halting progress, Hollywood enlisted more female directors in 2019 as representation rose past 10.6 percent overall for the year — still paltry but a 13-year high, a Jan. 2 report from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found. Universal led the way, with seven women helming films distributed by the studio or its subsidiaries. During the past 13 years, only 4.8 percent of 1,300 top-grossing films were directed by women. The study’s authors, led by Inclusion Initiative founder Stacy L. Smith, noted that the uptick signals “that hiring practices have started to shift behind the camera.”…

Hollywood box office growth in China officially flatlined in 2019 — and there is little reason to believe that conditions in the world’s No. 2 theatrical territory will improve anytime soon, analysts caution. Total ticket sales at Chinese cinemas climbed to $9.2 billion (RMB 64.3 billion) in 2019, up 5.4 percent from 2018. That’s a far cry from the galloping double-digit growth that characterized most of the past decade, but it’s still a respectable uptick for a market of China’s scale. But revenue from U.S. studio films released through the country’s quota system fell 2.7 percent, to $2.6 billion, as data from box office consultancy Artisan Gateway shows. Just two American films made it onto China’s year-end top 10 list — Avengers: Endgame ($614 million) and Fast & Furious Presents:…

Hot Lot Michelle Pfeiffer and David E. Kelley have sold their sprawling Silicon Valley estate in Woodside, California, for $22 million in an off-market all-cash deal. The 8.67-acre compound, which the actress and TV creator purchased in two parts in 2004 and 2008 for a combined $20.6 million, features a main house with four bedroom suites, three detached apartments for guest or staff, equestrian facilities and a private water well. FILM Timothée Chalamet (UTA, Ginsburg Daniels) will play Bob Dylan in an untitled Fox Searchlight biopic helmed by James Mangold. Rian Johnson (CAA, Lichter Grossman) is developing a Knives Out sequel centered on Daniel Craig’s detective character investigating a new case. Christian Bale (WME, GSB) is in talks to join Chris Hemsworth in Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder. Slave Play…

On July 26, Moulin Rouge! opened at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on Broadway, becoming the best-selling show of the new season, with gross sales topping $2 million a week and nearly $55 million for the year. Despite the impressive start, the elaborate $28 million stage adaptation of the Baz Luhrmann movie will need to sustain its current pace for a year or more before recouping, illustrating just how challenging the economics of the Broadway musical have become. Total box office for the 2019-20 season is lagging 6 percent behind that of 2018-19, while some ticket prices have dropped amid fierce competition. Still, optimism abounds, especially when it comes to Broadway plays that mine the catalogs of chart-topping musicians, be it the jukebox musical (Moulin Rouge!), the biographical adaptation (Tina: The…

I joke that I left swimming with the sharks at ICM to go swimming with actual sharks,” laughs Pier Nirandara, underwater photographer, YA author and — after taking a nearly yearlong break between jobs to dive around the world — director of development, international content, at Columbia Pictures. “If I can face a shark head-on, Hollywood doesn’t seem so daunting.” The Thailand-raised, PADI-certified rescue scuba diver is certainly not the only one in the entertainment industry obsessed with exploring the great unknown of the world’s oceans (see James Cameron, Tom Cruise and Nina Dobrev), but she’s the first to formally launch a Hollywood club dedicated to it. “It’s not as common as, say, people who play golf, but we’re definitely around,” says Nirandara, who recognized a shared passion among other…

On a Wednesday in mid-December, the bouncer at Lisa Vanderpump’s TomTom Bar nods in a parade of Korean tourists, West Hollywood locals and several dozen others who have come to pay homage to Vanderpump Rules, the Bravo docuseries following its eponymous restaurateur and her staff. The 59-year-old Vanderpump, whose genteel British facade is prone to break for sexual innuendo, has parlayed her show’s popularity — on the eve of its eighth season, which premieres Jan. 7, it still ranks among Bravo’s most watched with a weekly audience of 2.3 million — into a hospitality empire that also includes neighboring eateries SUR and Pump Lounge. An exceptionally strong Friday or Saturday can lure as many as 2,000 diners and drinkers to her over-the-top venues, decorated with glass-encased chandeliers, bouquets of fresh…

The career path Awkwafina has been on for the past decade isn’t unprecedented, but it illustrates a certain dissolving of media boundaries. It’s a Will Smith trajectory tossed in the blender, as the performer has gone from YouTube-fueled rapper to blockbuster scenestealer in Crazy Rich Asians to Oscar-worthy indie lead in The Farewell and now to sitcom star. So while an outdated perspective on that journey might frame Comedy Central’s Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens as a step backward, the fast-moving, energetic half-hour in fact represents another promising step on a zigzagging road to ubiquity. Created by Awkwafina, with Teresa Hsiao co-writing the pilot, the series reflects aspects of the star’s biography; Awkwafina indeed was born Nora Lum and grew up in Queens. As depicted here, Nora is 27 and…

History Channel leaped into the unknown with Project Blue Book, its 10-episode drama series based on the Air Force’s 1950s program investigating UFOs. The show, which returns for its second season Jan. 21, has turned out to be one of the top-rated cable series of 2019, averaging 3.3 million viewers — a welcome surprise for David O’Leary. The creator says he sold the network three years ago on his pitch for “a real-life X Files set in the time of Mad Men” that would follow the astronomer who spearheaded the top-secret government program, Dr. J. Allen Hynek (played by Game of Thrones’ Aidan Gillen). O’Leary, producer-writer Sean Jablonski and actors Gillen, Laura Mennell, Michael Malarkey and Neal McDonough delve into the true backstories behind the series, valuing “authenticity over accuracy” and…