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

On March 12, Broadway shut down, leaving thousands of performers and stagehands out of work. In the aftermath, Madam Secretary actor Erich Bergen called Rosie O’Donnell with a plan to help those in need. “He said right from the get-go to do it as a benefit for The Actors Fund,” O’Donnell recalls. “They give you actual money so you can live. That’s what we want.” But since the March 22 live-streamed event — which featured performances by Kristin Chenoweth, Tituss Burgess and Darren Criss and raised $600,000 for the fund — the number of Hollywood figures stepping up to assist less-fortunate industryites appears to have slowed even as hundreds of thousands of showbiz rank and file remain out of work. Per publicly disclosed individual donations, the entertainment industry’s one percent…

On April 1, only an hour after WarnerMedia revealed that Jason Kilar had been named its new CEO, Netflix chief Reed Hastings sent a tweet congratulating the former Hulu chief on his new gig, writing, “Scary for us to have you there.” When Kilar was the CEO of Hulu from 2007 to 2013, he turned a legacy media idea with a ridiculed name into Netflix’s biggest competitor, all while managing the complex politics that resulted from a business owned by three corporate rivals. At WarnerMedia, he arrives as the AT&T division prioritizes streaming with soon-to-launch, direct-to-consumer offering HBO Max. “The people that I talk to, they’re very eyes-wide-open and very much believers that there needs to be a lean into the future, there needs to be a sense of urgency…

Like many in the world, Cheryl Saban is hunkering down at home with her husband, music and media entrepreneur Haim Saban, while holding down the fort on two professional fronts. As the president of Saban Family Foundation, she continues to meet virtually with her staff of five, which will be busier in the coming months as vital services are pushed to the brink more than ever due to the coronavirus pandemic. As of July 2019, the foundation had donated $420 million to 1,000 causes and institutions including the Saban Community Clinic’s three Los Angeles locations. “People are going to have bigger needs now, once the dust settles a little bit,” she says. The Saban Family Clinics, which provide quality medical and dental care to more than 20,000 of L.A.’s most…

Richard Weitz ‘Can Make a Pandemic Fun’ What started in March as a virtual birthday party for Richard Weitz’s daughter has morphed into Hollywood’s best-attended online concert series. Since late March, the 50-year-old WME partner has hosted a halfdozen Zoom get-togethers, drawing not only some of the biggest names in the industry (Tina Fey, Greg Berlanti, Clive Davis, Universal’s Jeff Shell, to name a handful) but also some of the flashiest entertainment. At one party, John Mayer remotely sang “New Light.” At others, Josh Groban covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” and Billy Ray Cyrus performed “Old Town Road.” The April 4 event was the buzziest so far: 500 insiders caught Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez singing Frozen hits with their two daughters (Bob Iger helpfully pointed out in chat that…

It spoils nothing to reveal that in the Modern Family finale, there is a group hug so spectacularly COVID-unsafe that one 6-foot space is occupied by 16 different people. If Seinfeld was a show about nothing (Was it? Did any comedy ever have more plot?), Modern Family was always, unabashedly, about emotion. OK, why mince words in a post-apocalyptic world: It was about love. Certainly we always aimed for the high physical comedy moments: Phil, wearing a dog’s shock collar, reaching the edges of the yard … Claire smiling lugubriously at the topic of death … Gloria shooting a raft out from under Manny … Cam, in a Stanley Kowalski white T-shirt, yelling for a lost Stella, the dog. But these were adornments in the Modern Family house. The bricks…

Social isolation is difficult enough without seeing gray hairs emerge. But while salons are shuttered and elective procedures put on hold, beauty gurus are still staying in touch with their flocks. HAIR COLOR “We have been mailing out clients’ formulas to them with all the instruments they need,” says Paul Labrecque, who owns salons in New York and Palm Beach and tends to the tresses of Warner Bros. chair Ann Sarnoff. “If they need extra help, I will FaceTime with them.” Kadi Lee of Highbrow Hippie salon in Venice also has been dispensing customized kits. “We have been leaving them in driveways,’’ says Lee. “People are looking at you on Zoom, so these take care of the hair that frames your face and your hair part. All clients have to…

Shortly after 5 p.m. on Thursday, March 12, Chris Hayes sat down at a small table at the MSNBC offices at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York with his producer and a member of the New York Times editorial board to record an episode of his podcast, Why Is This Happening? As he listened to his guest talk about the history of the Electoral College, Hayes twice peered up at a screen in the corner of the room to see a chyron below anchor Chuck Todd that blared, “Stocks suffer their worst day since 1987 crash as alarm grows over coronavirus pandemic.” He stayed focused on the interview. A few hours later, filming his nightly show, All In, Hayes sat face-to-face with his guest, an emergency room doctor in New…

How much have you seen, read or heard about Netflix’s Tiger King? Among U.S. adults who watched Tiger King, 22 percent had a “very favorable” impression of Joe Exotic (above), while 19 percent had a “very unfavorable” view. Streaming Wars Platform Battle Source: THR/Morning Consult poll conducted April 2-4 among a nationally representative sample of 2,200 adults; Nielsen “Streaming TV Update” for March 2020.…

Jeremy Garelick was set to start filming on the eighth feature under his American High production banner in Liverpool, New York, when, on March 20, Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued the state’s shelter-in-place order. “Everyone was ready to go. Then the virus shut us down,” says Garelick, the writer-director behind The Wedding Ringer and other comedies, who founded the shingle in 2017 in partnership with LD Entertainment. American High focuses on high-school-set content, working out of an old Syracuse-area high school, where it has filmed seven features in two years. Its most recent release is Big Time Adolescence, starring Pete Davidson (which has shifted from theatrical to VOD release). While reading the news, Garelick came across a story about a local 3D printing company, Budmen Industries, that had designed and begun…

Social Action Founded by a group of execs (including HBO’s Nora Skinner, Discovery’s Erin Arend, Magnet Industries’ Jeff Berman and Hello Sunshine’s Sarah Harden), the relief effort Help Feed the Frontline Fighting COVID 19-L.A. raises funds to purchase meals from restaurants that are then delivered to Los Angeles health care workers. “We are now delivering 10,000 meals a week to 13 hospitals,” says co-founder and Horizon Media managing partner Shannon Pruitt of the group, which has partnered with chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen and former Top Chef winner Brooke Williamson of L.A. restaurant Playa Provisions. The group has so far raised nearly $600,000 through its GoFundMe page. “For health care workers, it shows that the community is rallying to support them, while at the same time it helps local…

During past natural disasters, many celebrities had been able to insulate themselves from danger by climbing aboard a private jet and zipping off to somewhere safe. There, from a comfortable distance, they were able to tweet emotional support to jetless fans. COVID-19 has changed that dynamic. As we read about famous people contracting the virus — among them Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Idris Elba and Andy Cohen — and others dying from it, such as playwright Terrence McNally, actors Mark Blum and Andrew Jack, and jazz musician Wallace Roney, it’s clear that there is no insulating from danger for anyone. Perhaps because of the imminent threat, stars’ public response has been much more engaged. Some have been inspiring, some funny, some tonal head-scratchers — and some actually harmful to public…

Dana Brunetti remembers exactly what he was thinking the day he sold his four Ferraris and made an offer on a remote 40-acre plot in Northern California’s Sierra foothills — and it had nothing to do with the novel coronavirus. This was December, just before the first reports of a deadly epidemic in China had started trickling into the Western media. “I was over fucking L.A.,” says the producer, 46. “And I have been for a while.” While the rest of the industry is hunkering down in Southern California, the guy who produced The Social Network and House of Cards — who was just as famous for his Entourage-esque lifestyle as he was for making award-winning movies and TV shows — is sporting a Grizzly Adams beard and sitting out…

Friday, March 13, was a surreal day in filmmakers Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan’s Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, townhouse. That was the day President Trump officially declared coronavirus a national emergency, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced restrictions on mass gatherings — and Garbus’ first scripted film, the crime drama Lost Girls, premiered on Netflix and hit the streaming service’s top 10 list in the U.S. Amid the increasingly grave news about the pandemic, there was no time to savor Garbus’ achievement. The married and professional partners and documentary veterans had to focus on a more practical problem: how to manage their burgeoning new production company, Story Syndicate, which at the time had 50 people working on various projects, many of them cycling through the company’s new offices in the Dumbo…

A century after female suffrage became the law of the land, there is still no constitutional ban on legalized discrimination against women. The closest America came to passing the Equal Rights Amendment was, ironically, nearly half a century ago. The new miniseries Mrs. America — debuting on Hulu after being greenlit at FX — is just about as compelling a depiction as one could hope for of the long fight for the ERA’s ratification, as well as the ultimately successful conservative backlash against the bill. Created by Dahvi Waller (a former writer-producer on Mad Men) — with episodes directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Captain Marvel, Mississippi Grind), Amma Asante (Belle) and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre (The Mustang) — the nine-part drama alternates between anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett)…

By April 3, the greatest calendar migration in the 100-year-plus history of the movie business was complete as virtually all major summer tentpoles relocated amid the coronavirus pandemic. The release-date shuffle revealed the industry’s collective hope that moviegoing will return to normal levels by mid-July. If this scenario holds, North American box office revenue will struggle to hit $7 billion for the year, the lowest figure in more than two decades and nearly 40 percent behind 2019 ($11.4 billion), per London-based research firm Gower Street Analytics. The company estimates that domestic revenue will come in at $6.82 billion if all 5,400 theaters stateside stay shuttered for a full three months, with traffic returning to normal levels immediately. If theaters are closed for three months, but traffic builds slowly, that number…

Within days in mid-March, soundstages in the U.S. went from bustling hubs to abandoned ghost towns as the novel coronavirus forced studios to shut down filming. “There is nothing like being the only person on a movie lot,” says Mark Nicholas, one of few people able to keep working at Manhattan Beach Studios in California in order to assist in the live-streaming of local mayor and sheriff news addresses. “It’s deathly quiet and feels very much like The Walking Dead.” While most lots sit empty for the foreseeable future, the question atop industry insiders’ minds is how the executives in charge of them plan to handle a production logjam that’s likely to await them on the other side of this crisis. Dozens of films and TV series that had to…

Amid the Safer at Home order, L.A. synagogues and churches are broadcasting services online. “It reminds me of the 10 plagues,” Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center tells THR of Passover during the time of COVID-19. Echoes Fuzzy Door Productions president Erica Huggins, “Given our current plague, the connection has not been lost on anyone.” Many plan to gather via Zoom. Says Jason Alexander of the “e-Seder” he’s invited to, “I’m hoping I only need to provide the salted water, because where the hell am I going to get a lamb shank?” Adds manager Jeff Field, “I am putting a bottle of Purell on my door so the angel will pass over us.” Barbra Streisand and James Brolin celebrate Passover (first night is April 8) and Easter (April…

As the coronavirus takes a toll on the U.S. job market — nearly 10 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in the two weeks ending March 28 — U.S. entertainment companies like Disney are furloughing “nonessential” employees and asking executives to take pay cuts. But overseas, a much different approach has taken hold: International governments and media firms are enacting aggressive programs to keep workers on the books. In Germany, they call it Kurzarbeit (short-term work). In France, it’s Chômage partiel (partial unemployment). Italy has Cassa Integrazione Guadagni (an earnings redundancy fund), while Spain offers ERTE, or Expediente de Regulación Temporal de Empleo (temporary employment regulation process). The British have the newly introduced Job Retention Scheme, and Canadians have the recently unveiled Emergency Wage Subsidy. Everywhere the goal is the…

DAVID MUIR Anchor WHAT DOES YOUR DAY LOOK LIKE NOW? I work from home for much of the day and go in late afternoon — we’re all trying to limit any kind of interaction. I’ll be honest: When I walk down those hallways to set, it’s eerily quiet. Doors are closed because producers are working from home or in isolation. I miss that interaction — a huge part of what brings a broadcast together. But these are different times, so I make the walk now not seeing anyone other than a director. SAMANTHA BEE Late Night Host WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT YOURSELF? I have for sure learned that there’s a homesteader lurking inside me not too deep. This is the moment that this part of me has ignited. Like,…

Quibi is launching at either exactly the wrong time or exactly the right time. The model of the shortform programming streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman was built on providing viewers with “quick bites” — the name, pronounced “Qui-bee,” therefore ought to be “Qui-bye” — of drama, comedy, unscripted content and news that could be watched on a phone during pauses in ordinary life: mid-commute, waiting for a meeting to start, etc. (Each episode runs between four and 10 minutes.) With much of the population now in coronavirus crisis-induced confinement, though, “ordinary life” is wishful thinking. That said, shut-in audiences are hungry for content. And for $5 a month with ads or $8 without, Quibi has that in abundance. It’s less clear, based on the 24 programs…