Innholdsfortegnelse for Wednesday, January 22, 2020 i The Hollywood Reporter

Former Universal Pictures marketing chief Josh Goldstine has won a multimillion-dollar legal ruling against the studio in a case that an arbitrator appears to have deemed a devastating misfire of the #MeToo era. In February 2018, top NBCUniversal executives Jeff Shell and Donna Langley sent a memo to staff announcing that the film studio’s president of worldwide marketing was being suspended and investigated for “inappropriate conduct.” No details were given, but the strong implication was that Goldstine had committed a #MeToo offense. In March 2018, Goldstine was fired; the episode was widely reported. (Sister division NBC News had fired Matt Lauer for alleged misconduct a few months earlier, in November 2017.) Finding himself unemployable, Goldstine initiated legal action. Now, thanks to an arbitration award this month said to be in…

Seven Deadly Shadows (HARPERTEEN, JAN. 28) BY Courtney Alameda and Valynne E. Maetani AGENCY UTA The retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai follows outcast Kira, who can see the demons that haunt the streets of Kyoto. The anime-tinged story could fit well at a streamer like Netflix, which already produces Japanese-inspired content for global audiences. A Witch in Time (REDHOOK, FEB. 11) BY Constance Sayers AGENCY The Dijkstra Agency Cursed to relive the same tragic love affair and early death over centuries, Juliet must find a way to break her life-and-death pattern. The fantastical love story is reminiscent of early aughts installments like The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Lake House.…

Undeterred by a recent surge in private membership clubs in Los Angeles, NeueHouse is set to launch two new L.A. outposts — one opening Jan. 20 in the iconic Bradbury Building downtown; the other due later this year in Venice Beach, THR has learned. NeueHouse is taking over the entire second floor — 25,000 square feet — of the Bradbury, a five-story office building that has long been a top tourist attraction because of its skylit atrium, ornate wrought-iron latticework and M.C. Escher-like stairways. The Bradbury, built in 1893, is not only the city’s oldest landmarked building but one with enough film appearances to fill out an entire IMDb page, having served as a location in such films as Double Indemnity, Chinatown, Blade Runner, Lethal Weapon 4, (500) Days of…

Sound has been a Minkler family affair since 1929, when Darrell Minkler moved to Hollywood from Chicago to work on the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system at Warner Bros., providing soundtracks for the early days of the talkies. His son, Don Minkler, followed in his footsteps, working as a rerecording mixer on projects such as 1967’s Tarzan series and 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. These achievements were followed by three-time Oscar winner Michael Minkler and his son Christian Minkler, the third and fourth generation of Minklers to forge their path in the world of Hollywood sound. Combined with their uncles, Bob and Lee Minkler, these four Minklers have now earned a total of 16 Oscar nominations and four wins. Michael and Christian Minkler came together to work on Quentin Tarantino’s…

Will Sundance 2020, which starts Jan. 23, offer a repeat of last year’s explosive market when a record four films sold for more than $13 million apiece, totaling $56 million? Probably not, given that those four — New Line’s Blinded by the Light and Amazon’s Late Night, The Report and Brittany Runs a Marathon — earned a combined $47 million at the box office. So a market correction could be in order. While some active buyers in recent years have retreated from the distribution space (like Annapurna), others may be picking up the slack (HBO Max, Apple and even Disney+). Subtitled fare could be the next hot sales subgenre in Park City, with ICM Partners’ Jessica Lacy noting, “With the success of Parasite and The Farewell, I am hopeful distributors…

The last time moviegoers saw Brenda Chapman was a bittersweet moment onstage at the Oscars in 2013, when the animation director appeared, ever so briefly, to thank her daughter for inspiring the movie Brave. In the midst of production, Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter had removed Chapman from Brave over creative differences and replaced her with director Mark Andrews, a move that particularly smarted for many in the animation world because of the ground Chapman had broken — she was Pixar’s first female director and remains the only woman to have helmed a film at the celebrated studio. The movie itself introduced Pixar’s first female protagonist, a plucky heroine who was a sharp departure from Disney’s long tradition of docile princesses. Seven years after Brave won the Academy Award…

THE TOURIST (2010) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s $100 million remake of a 2005 French film quickly became a punchline thanks to bad reviews (its Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 20 percent). The Angelina Jolie-Johnny Depp pic made $67 million domestic (it fared better with $210 million internationally) and has become a popular example of when U.S. remakes go wrong. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011) David Fincher’s $90 million remake of a 2009 Swedish film barely broke even in the U.S., grossing $102 million, though it fared better internationally with an additional $130 million. “Having a known IP gives you a leg up, but it’s the movie that really matters,” says Comscore’s Paul Dergarabedian. “Known IP is not a guaranteed success.” GHOST IN THE SHELL (2017) The redo of…

Given the volatile nature of the indie film business, financiers typically need a day job to buffer against lean times. One way to offset the lows is having a stronghold in the more stable and lucrative commercials business. With plenty of overlap between the two industries, several companies are thriving in both spaces. The phenomenon isn’t entirely new. The late Steve Golin blazed the trail of having a commercials and film business under the same roof while turning advertising directors into the next hot commodity in the indie world, first at Propaganda Films and later at Anonymous Content. Leading the pack these days is Park Pictures, which will launch four films at Sundance, including U.S. Dramatic Competition entrant Farewell Amor and the Richard Jenkinsled comedy The Last Shift, screening in…

While some designers forgo school in favor of on-the-job training, a costume degree is still a major plus. Intangible factors such as alumni groups and networking coupled with specialized courses, résumé-boosting experience on school theatrical productions, internships and post-grad job preparation are invaluable. “I still use all I learned at Tisch,” says three-time Oscar-winning costume designer Mark Bridges (Joker, Marriage Story), a Tisch School of the Arts graduate. “The way to work with a director and an actor and create character, color and line, all of it still goes to work with me every day, some 30 years after graduation.” For this list, THR consulted with costume designers and professors to choose 10 top schools based on curriculum, reputation, alumni success and networking opportunities. California Institute of the Arts VALENCIA,…

BAFTA Awards Feb. 2 Royal Albert Hall The Academy may be under pressure to shorten the length of the Oscars ceremony, but across the pond things appear to be going in the opposite direction. This year will actually see the BAFTAs extend its show with the addition of a new award: best casting, the first new film honor introduced in 21 years by the British Academy. Up for the inaugural honor are Joker, Marriage Story, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Two Popes and — offering a distinctly British addition to the mix — Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield. The move, which was widely applauded across the industry when it was first revealed in the summer of 2019 (Richard E. Grant was among the actors to…

34th ASC Awards Jan. 25 Ray Dolby Ballroom Aveteran cinematographer well known for his contributions to independent cinema, Frederick Elmes has collaborated with directors including David Lynch, John Cassavetes, Ang Lee and Jim Jarmusch. Elmes, 73, who will receive the lifetime achievement award at the American Society of Cinematographers Awards on Jan. 25, talked to THR about his career and how Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) marked a “turning point.” Tell us about the look that you and David Lynch conceived for Blue Velvet. We tried the whole idea of desaturating the color and shifting it in one direction or another. It wasn’t helping the story, and it didn’t seem to have any emotion attached to it. And then we decided, let’s look at the normal film stock of the era,…

The 2020 Golden Globe Awards sparked a sea change when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association switched the dinner menu to all plant-based ingredients, a first for a major awards show. The Critics’ Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards then followed suit, as will WME for its Oscar weekend party (catered by vegan restaurant Nic’s on Beverly). Other awards-season soirees are now feeling the heat in the kitchen as organizers scramble to figure out what will send the right message. So far, the Academy has not declared whether its Governors Ball will go all-vegan. Last year, it presented 15 vegan dishes, along with meat and fish, courtesy of chef Wolfgang Puck. Not everyone can go vegan, some organizers say. “Our meal will include a vegan option, but as this…

SAG Awards Los Angeles, Jan. 19 PGA Awards Los Angeles, Jan. 18 Party Crawler Actors Aplenty Bong Joon Ho (11) earned the nickname “Proud Dad” on Twitter for video-recording his Parasite cast as they took the stage to accept the award for best motion picture ensemble. The cast made history at the Shrine Auditorium as Parasite became the first foreign-language film to win in the category. History — both professional and personal — might’ve been the 26th SAG Awards theme. Winners Brad Pitt (1) and Jennifer Aniston (1) caught up backstage (Pitt even stole a moment to watch her acceptance speech for The Morning Show). More history: Judy star Renée Zellweger (14) dedicated her actor statue to Ms. Garland; Joker lead and best actor winner Joaquin Phoenix (14) praised his…

Engagements Nick Babiarz, vp awards at Ginsberg Libby, and Derek Schulte, publicity manager at Columbia Pictures, got engaged Dec. 27 in Oahu, Hawaii, at the Kualoa Ranch where Jurassic Park was shot. The couple, who have been together for seven years, plan to wed in 2021. Younger star Molly Bernard announced her engagement to Hannah Lieberman via Instagram Jan. 14. Births Composer/music producer Dan Diaz, whose recent work includes The Mandalorian and Knives Out trailers, and wife Britta Diaz, realtor at Berkshire Hathaway Pacific Palisades, welcomed daughter McKenna Jane Diaz on Dec. 10 at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica. Congrats Sony Pictures TV’s Funimation named Asa Suehira chief content officer and Kaliel Roberts chief product officer Jan. 16. ViacomCBS upped Sarah Babineau to head of Comedy Central content and…

Will the 2020 election be rocked by a #MeToo trial, specifically the defamation suit filed by season five Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos against Donald Trump in January 2017, just three days before he was sworn in as president? It’s unlikely but not out of the realm of possibility. Until recently, Zervos was on the fast track in her case that alleges Trump lied during the 2016 campaign when he denied attacking her in a hotel room more than a decade ago. The parties agreed that Trump would soon sit for a deposition, fact discovery would be completed by March 2, and summary judgment motions would be filed by the end of April. That potentially opened the door for a trial as soon as New York Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Schecter…

In the fall of 2017, producer Howard T. Owens got a call from famed Washington power broker Robert Barnett. Barnett’s longtime client, Hillary Clinton, was sitting on nearly 2,000 hours of campaign footage and planned to turn it into a documentary. Hulu was already on board to distribute it domestically, but would Owens consider producing and selling it abroad? The son of a onetime Democratic state senator from Connecticut and himself the former head of National Geographic Channel, Owens was immediately interested. He’d have to meet and woo Secretary Clinton and her top aide, Huma Abedin, he was told, and then, with the streamer, begin compiling a list of potential filmmakers. The only requirement: that she be female. Nanette Burstein, a political junkie whose résumé included the celebrated 2002 Robert…

It was the independent studio that once reigned supreme at Sundance, snapping up exciting new projects and filmmakers with the promise of showcasing their work on the big screen. But in the age of deep-pocketed streamers — Netflix committed $15 billion for original content in 2019, Amazon devoted $7.5 billion, Apple appointed $6 billion and Hulu spent $2.5 billion — indie filmmakers are finding new demand for their work on the small screen. Here’s who’ll be repping the streamers on the ground in Park City. AMAZON Amazon led Sundance acquisitions in 2019, throwing down a whopping $47 million for five movies, including $13 million for Late Night and $5 million for Honey Boy. While neither quite paid off at the box office (the former grossed $22 million worldwide, the latter…

1 Fight back before you even arrive, says Vicky Vlachonis, author of The Body Doesn’t Lie and ambassador of UCLA’s division of digestive diseases, who recommends a face mask on the plane: “If you don’t want to wear a mask, cover your ears, neck and throat.” 2 “I get a flu shot,” says Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard. “I used to not get the flu shot, and I got sick every year.” Bernard says exposure was significantly worse pre-cellphone: “Everyone had to talk on pay phones. And that spread [the germs] a lot.” 3 Drink eight to 10 glasses of water a day. Explains Stephanie Daniel, doctor of osteopathic medicine, “Partying, drinking [alcohol] and high altitude is the perfect recipe for drying you out and making you more susceptible…

Who says Sundance caters only to the undiscovered and obscure? This year’s festival will feature a bevy of names and companies not typically associated with indie cinema, from Disney+ to Will Smith, Angelina Jolie and Ben Affleck. In fact, the art house mecca launched 42 years ago as a tonic to the corporatization of cinema will feel more mainstream than in past years thanks to the growing importance of the Kids sidebar as well as a few tentpole stars making an unlikely detour into art house fare. Tom McCarthy, director of Disney+’s Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made, which debuts Jan. 25 at Sundance, says there’s no better place to introduce a film that “breaks some Disney rules” than in Park City. “Look, it’s a changing world,” says the Spotlight helmer…

56th CAS Awards Jan. 25, InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown As he reflects on his four decades working with Martin Scorsese, rerecording mixer Tom Fleischman smiles, recalling the roughly 25 feature and documentary productions on which they collaborated, from 1980’s Raging Bull to the director’s most recent mob epic, The Irishman. His favorite part of the collaboration? “When we’ve been working for hours on a difficult sequence or a tricky musical transition and I turn around and we both smile and nod and he shouts, ‘Great!’ And gives me a thumbs-up.” Born and raised in New York, Fleischman is the son of legendary film editor Dede Allen and television documentary writer-producer-director Stephen Fleischman. Tom Fleischman first worked for Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker doing temp dubs on Raging Bull, starring Robert…

Fifty-two years ago, The Hollywood Reporter described Patrick Stewart — who stars in Star Trek: Picard, launching on CBS All Access on Jan. 23 — as “dashing” in the role of Duke Senior in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre. (THR also noted that Ben Kingsley as Amiens sang the ballads “with delicacy.”) Stewart, then 27, had accompanied the RSC to L.A. for an eight-week run. Gordon Davidson (who died in 2016) was trying to set up an exchange agreement between his Center Theatre Group and the RSC that would also send his productions to London. The Ahmanson run was the future Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s first trip to Southern California, and for him a cultural standout was the original Tommy’s Hamburgers…

Major entertainment companies are finally taking on Netflix in the world of streaming video, but the strategies, investments and goals vary. While NBCUniversal’s Peacock is leaning on a low price, large library and advanced advertising to bolster its business, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max is betting on a massive content library and slate of originals, with a higher monthly price tag. Disney+, meanwhile, is focusing on a smaller slate of programming, but with a tight focus on family-friendly fare built around its well-established IP.…

BEST PICTURE Parasite Bong Joon Ho’s South Korean genre-bending thriller made history by becoming the first non-English-language film to win the best ensemble SAG award, which has predicted best picture Oscar shockers like Shakespeare in Love, Crash and Spotlight. It also took ACE’s prize for best-edited drama. 1917 Sam Mendes’ World War I saga won the top PGA prize — determined by preferential ballot, like the best pic Oscar — over its eight best pic Oscar rivals plus Knives Out. The same film won top honors from the PGA and the Academy in 21 of the past 30 years. 1917 also won MPSE’s award for best dialogue/ADR. Once Upon a Time In Hollywood There was once a school of thought that believed Quentin Tarantino’s nostalgic Hollywood period piece would win…

Critics’ Choice Selfie Problem Goes From Bad to Worse The Critics’ Choice Awards has been struggling for years with a selfie problem — with attendees bum-rushing stars for photographs — but this year one group of critics took it to a whole new level. Members of the Houston Film Critics Society spent much of the Jan. 12 ceremony — broadcast live on The CW — unpacking and distributing their own framed award certificates during commercial breaks, then capturing photos of themselves with such recipients as Renée Zellweger, Quentin Tarantino, Jessie Buckley and Zhao Shuzhen. “They were basically piggybacking on an awards show to put on their own awards show,” gripes a source at the event. “They looked really stressed, running around, and they seemed especially frustrated that they couldn’t get…

On Michelle Jubelirer’s desk sits a nameplate that says “Fuck You.” On a coffee table in the Capitol Music Group chief operating officer’s pop-artfilled office is a gold statue of a hand, middle finger extended skyward, as well as a sign that reads “Suck less. Thanks.” These serve as reminders that even though the Pittsburgh native has ascended to the C-suite of Hollywood’s Capitol Tower, she still knows it’s only rock ’n’ roll: “No matter how serious I am in business, there will always be a little punk inside me.” Though music was always her passion, Jubelirer, 45, initially chose to go into law. “Because I had a father die when I was 3, I was cognizant that I needed to always have a way to support myself financially,” she…

The Academy this year must choose among heartless hitmen and sprinting soldiers, supportive sisters and depressed divorcees, action actors and comic book killers. Which of these will win best picture? Data suggests there are many possible answers. After all, this is the first year in Oscar history with four films receiving 10 or more nominations each. The previous record was three, shared by 1964 (Mary Poppins, Becket, My Fair Lady) and 1977 (Julia, The Turning Point, Star Wars). Each of this year’s 10-plus-nominee contenders – Joker, 1917, The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — can make a compelling case for frontrunner status. With 11 nominations, the comic-book-movie-slash-social-commentary Joker leads the pack (the other three have 10 apiece). Historically, films with the most nominations in their year (or…

When Dan Lin and Ava DuVernay each opened production campuses in Historic Filipinotown in 2019, both producers were concerned about the impact their projects might have on a Los Angeles community already at risk of displacement. “We wanted to be in a community of color. We didn’t want to be in Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades. I wanted a place where we could take part in the culture,” DuVernay tells THR. “But gentrification is a real thing.” DuVernay, creator of 2019’s When They See Us, is discussing her Array Creative Campus, a 14,000-square-foot, three-building compound on Glendale Boulevard. Just a few blocks away is Lin’s Rideback Ranch, a 35,000-square-foot mixeduse facility that transformed an abandoned post office into a sprawling Western-themed office and co-working space. Array and Rideback have a…

MONICA REVISITED In a first, both Hillary and Bill talk in detail about his affair as president with then-intern Monica Lewinsky, including the lies, heartache, counseling and fallout. Holding back tears, Bill opens up about the pain he caused his wife and daughter as well as Lewinsky: “I feel terrible about the fact that Monica Lewinsky’s life was defined by it,” he says. “Over the years, I’ve watched her try to get a normal life back.” WELLESLEY MOMENT Nanette Burstein pairs a Clinton classmate’s rarely seen video footage with audio from her famed 1969 Wellesley commencement speech, marking the first time people can see and hear a speech that landed Clinton in Life magazine as a voice of her generation. HEALTH CARE DOUBTS Asked if there were any mistakes she’d…

After removing her name from the Sundance documentary On the Record, Oprah Winfrey appears to be straddling #MeToo fault lines. On the one hand, the 65-year-old media mogul has said she believes the women featured in the film who accuse Russell Simmons of sexual assault. On the other hand, she now has said that there are inconsistencies in the account told by Drew Dixon, the film’s main accuser, that “gave me pause.” Her withdrawal came as a shock to the accusers who, according to sources, were never contacted by Winfrey right before or after dropping the film. Hanging in the balance is Dixon herself, whose harrowing claims of being sexually attacked by Simmons in 1994 lie at the heart of Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s doc, set to debut Jan.…

Edson Oda had a comfortable career working in advertising in São Paulo, Brazil. He’d created hit campaigns for the likes of Whirlpool, Honda, Nokia and Johnson & Johnson. He’d won plenty of awards, including the Gold Lion at the Cannes International Creativity Festival in 2009. At 26, he was selected as one of the top 12 creatives under 30 by the CLIO Awards Festival. But after 10 years, he chose to give it all up and move to Los Angeles in 2012 to pursue a career as a filmmaker. “It was almost like a calling,” says Oda, now 37. “I decided either do it now or never.” He got his master’s in film at USC. At first, he wrote a bunch of scripts that he never really liked that much.…

“Marty is very open to trying things, not just with me but with every person he works with. That’s just the way he is. He’s very receptive, and that creates a kind of confidence in people, so they know that even if they come up with a bad idea or not a great one, it’s OK. It’s all about trying things.” ROBERT DE NIRO, ACTOR Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, The Irishman “Marty is gifted with a bold imagination and always open to breaking the rules. But this originates with a phenomenal knowledge and memory of movies — forever a student of the art. Working on the soundtrack for Casino, there were a couple of scenes where…

DGA Awards Jan. 25 Ritz-Carlton Hotel, DTLA Sure, there were no women nominated for the best directing Oscar or the DGA film award, but it’s a very different story with the DGA’s first-time feature film directors category, which spotlights three rising-star female directors. Ahead of the Jan. 25 ceremony, which will honor winners in several categories including features, television series, reality and documentary, THR spoke with these five nominated helmers about what they learned from their first time making a feature film. JOE TALBOT, THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO Talbot learned all about the spirit of collaboration working on his debut feature. “When we were developing [the film], an ever-changing cast of collaborators would join our core team for a couple of days at a time and pump…

Annie Awards Jan. 25 Royce Hall, UCLA Animation has come a long way since artists painted each frame of Mickey Mouse by hand, and Ron Clements and John Musker have seen that evolution firsthand. The Disney directing duo is behind some of the studio’s most revered tales, from 1989’s The Little Mermaid and 1992’s Aladdin to 2016’s Moana. They’ll each be feted with Winsor McCay Awards, honoring career achievements, at the Jan. 25 Annie Awards ceremony. The Little Mermaid was the last Disney feature to use hand-painted cel animation. Would you reflect on the period of transition to computer animation? JOHN MUSKER Although I loved Toy Story when it came out, I didn’t foresee the wholesale move in feature animation away from hand-drawn and into CG. I still think they…