Innholdsfortegnelse for Wednesday, November 18, 2020 i The Hollywood Reporter

A hotly contested presidential election. A candidate refusing to concede until the courts sealed his fate. The loser left licking his chops, ultimately securing financing to turn his political base into an audience for a new cable TV channel. The candidate? Former vice president and 2000 Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore. The channel? Current TV. The end result? Cultural irrelevance but a nine-figure payday when the channel sold to Al Jazeera for $500 million in 2012 as the Qatar-based outlet bought itself distribution through Current’s 40 million U.S. households. Current TV had the good fortune of breaking into cable when carriage fees flowed freely and advertiser demand for TV was nearly unlimited. Now, President Trump, furious at Fox News’ coverage of the election, is weighing a TV venture of his…

Behind the Viral Sensation of America: Endgame On Nov. 5, after two days of election uncertainty, film editor John Handem Piette ditched political frustration in favor of tinkering with his favorite scene, the Avengers: Endgame finale, just for fun. With Georgia proving to be a Senate battleground, he had a vision of placing the head of voting activist Stacey Abrams on Black Panther character Okoye. “That’s when it clicked,” he says of America: Endgame, a reimagining featuring Joe Biden as Captain America, Kamala Harris as Falcon and Donald Trump as Thanos. The video has been viewed more than 33.4 million times on Twitter. “When LeBron retweeted it, that was mind-blowing,” says Piette. “When Mark Hamill retweeted it, I had to put my phone down.” Job offers followed, but the editor…

One week after its southern Ohio county voted to reelect Donald Trump by a 24-point margin, the Cinema 10 in the steel town of Middletown was playing host to a Hollywood film premiere of sorts, a prerelease screening of the new Netflix movie Hillbilly Elegy. The Ron Howard film, which stars Amy Adams and Glenn Close as a pair of flawed but tenacious Appalachian matriarchs, is based on J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir about rising out of poverty in Middletown with the help of his Kentucky-born grandmother (Close) and eventually attending Yale Law School. The week of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the book was No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, propelled there in part because Vance was in the media helping to explain Trump’s popularity among poor…

SHORT TERM 12 2013 Stanfield’s performance in Destin Daniel Cretton’s debut about a home for at-risk youth earned him an Independent Spirit nomination for supporting actor. ATLANTA 2016-PRESENT As the eccentric Darius Epps in Donald Glover’s FX Emmy winner, Stanfield turned what could have been one-note comic foil into a core part of the show. GET OUT 2017 His role in Jordan Peele’s $244 million-grossing genrechanging horror flick was supporting but climactic — he shouts the film’s ominous title. SORRY TO BOTHER YOU 2018 Boots Riley’s Sundance sensation about a Black telemarketer who adopts a Caucasian accent to close sales proved Stanfield could carry a film. THE PHOTOGRAPH 2020 This stylish but little-seen drama from producer Will Packer and co-starring Issa Rae showcases Stanfield in a new light — romantic…

The pandemic has shuttered productions, delayed releases and turned Hollywood on its head. What it hasn’t done is slow the pace of emails or phone calls, which is why the industry’s assistant community — or at least those in it who haven’t been laid off or furloughed — is still hard at work. A sampling of Hollywood assistants, mainly those working for executives, producers and agents, say the newly blurred lines between work and whatever’s left for their personal lives has made it that much more challenging to strike any kind of balance. “I feel like I have to be on call every minute of the day and by my computer to answer emails at a moment’s notice to prove that I’m working,” says one development assistant, who, like everyone…

Nov. 17, 2020, marks a milestone in Hollywood’s distribution history. That’s when Cinemark Entertainment stunned the town by signing a multiyear deal endorsing Universal’s bold move to create a new premium ondemand window in the U.S. that will see movies — both big and small — be made available in the home months earlier than they normally would. Few thought that Cinemark, led by CEO Mark Zoradi, would agree to such an arrangement beyond the COVID-19 crisis, yet the deal is for three to five years, insiders say. The pact means Universal has two of the country’s largest circuits on its side after this summer’s agreement with AMC Entertainment. The landmark partnerships create a 17-day PVOD window for smaller and mid-range Universal titles, and 31 days for event pictures that…

The Charlotte Kirk scandal has brought unwanted publicity — and in a couple of high-profile cases, professional calamity — to an assortment of Hollywood players. But a new entity has surfaced in documents recently filed in litigation arising from the Kirk saga: Dune Entertainment, the film finance company formerly run by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. An unknown party added the name “Dune Entertainment” by hand to an August 2017 settlement document listing people and companies protected from liability in any legal matter involving Kirk and the group of men who she claims sexually abused her. The settlement document includes references to multiple Mnuchin-associated entities: Dune Entertainment LLC, Dune Entertainment II LLC and Dune Entertainment III LLC. Kirk has made no allegations against Mnuchin or Dune Entertainment. Through a spokesperson, Mnuchin…

On Nov. 3, election night, Patrisse Cullors — one of the three co-founders of Black Lives Matter and a TV writer (Good Trouble) who recently signed an overall deal with Warner Bros. Television Group — co-hosted a streaming event on YouTube featuring such Hollywood allies as America Ferrera, Chelsea Handler and Tessa Thompson. “The primary mood for me was anxiety, with secondary moods of excitement and inspiration,” she said. “We knew that night we won Yes on 17, [the California proposition] that restored voting rights for people coming home on parole, and we knew that [Los Angeles County’s] Measure J had passed, which will build an alternative to an incarceration budget.” It would, of course, take four more days until the presidential race was called for Joe Biden. In the…

Not quite halfway through a 10-hour virtual “Vote-a-Thon” hosted by Seth Rudetsky and James Wesley of daily live-streamed series Stars in the House, Annette Bening found herself fighting back tears. “The spirit you’ve brought to this show from the beginning, it’s so human and makes everybody want to be a part of it,” said Bening to the indefatigable couple. By mid-November, the series passed the milestone of raising $570,000 for The Actors Fund, which has provided lifelines for more than 14,000 arts and entertainment pros, many of whom had gigs vanish overnight because of the pandemic. With a team of 10 paid staffers, Rudetsky and Wesley produced 300-plus episodes in eight months, with concerts, performances and headline-making Hollywood and Broadway cast reunions (Scandal, Family Ties, Taxi, A Chorus Line, Fun…

Celebrity stylist Jeanne Yang is shifting her gift approach this holiday season. “People are going to be focused on things that feel substantive,” predicts Yang, who during the pandemic fell in love with the “One Small Step” series on StoryCorps, which connects people from disparate backgrounds to discuss conflicts or commonalities. “Rather than going on Instagram and watching someone flaunt their ostentatious purchase, the five minutes you spend listening to these stories could impact you in a positive way,” says Yang, who is donating to both StoryCorps and No Kid Hungry on behalf of friends and family this year while also supporting small businesses like Vroman’s, the Pasadena bookstore. With restaurants continuing to struggle, gift cards can provide an important lifeline. Many spots are adding a premium to purchases, such…

“The Talk” — the conversation many Black parents have with their children about racism and police brutality in America — was thrust into the mainstream cultural spotlight in 2015 with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, the best-selling, National Book Award-winning epistle addressed to his 15-year-old son. Part memoir, part history lesson, part life advice and part eulogy, the slim but essential volume debuted a year after the police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, making Coates’ requiem for a Howard University acquaintance — Prince Jones, also murdered by law enforcement — that much more devastating. Another Howard classmate, Kamilah Forbes, adapted and directed Between the World and Me for the stage in 2018, distilling the book’s lyrical rage and oracular pithiness. Forbes…

Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino’s Western epic that turns 40 on Nov. 19, earned a place in Hollywood infamy for bankrupting United Artists and bringing the curtain down on the auteur era of the 1970s. But the truth is, Heaven’s Gate is good. In its Nov. 20, 1980, review, The Hollywood Reporter said the film — about the 1892 Johnson County War, in which wealthy Wyoming cattle owners slaughtered immigrant homesteaders — had “explosive force” and was “richly textured and visually compelling.” But THR was an outlier. After it screened for critics in New York on Nov. 18, the buzz was instantaneous: Cimino’s film — whose massive cost overruns had been covered in the press — was a disaster. “I always suspected that maybe the movie got talked about too much…

Even the smallest window into Tracey Wigfield’s life seems to validate her chosen career. Her Studio City home and now makeshift office, which she shares with her husband, fellow comedy scribe Adam Countee, their nearly-3-year-old daughter, their infant son and, since the start of the pandemic, her parents, could easily double as a set for one of the sitcoms she’s written — 30 Rock, The Mindy Project and Great News, to name a few. During an early November Zoom, the showrunner is twice interrupted by her polite but assertive toddler, for whom she wryly punts child-rearing duties to her own mom off-camera. The New Jersey native returned to the Universal lot in July to complete production on Saved by the Bell — her tongue-in-cheek reboot-meets-remake of the ’90s teen comedy…

ROWING UP IN VICTORVILLE — A ROUGH, DUSTY TOWN IN CALIFORNIA’S HIGH DESERT — LAKEITH STANFIELD WOULD PASS THE SWELTERING SUMMER DAYS ON HIS BICYCLE. IT WAS A CHERISHED GIFT FROM A FATHER WHO POPPED IN AND OUT OF HIS LIFE UNANNOUNCED, SOMETIMES NOT SHOWING UP FOR YEARS AT A TIME. “I REMEMBER HIM TEACHING ME HOW TO RIDE IT, AND THAT BEING QUITE HARD, AND ME FALLING AND CRASHING,” STANFIELD SAYS. He eventually got the hang of it and started learning tricks — first riding with no hands, then standing on the seat, then throwing his legs over the handlebars and lying backward. His daredevil maneuvers impressed the local kids — “I felt like I was a star,” he recalls. “It was the freest I ever felt” — which…

Cazzie David might be slightly less anxious at the moment. With the election in the rearview mirror and her debut essay collection, Nobody Asked for This, now in stores, the 26-year-old writer may in fact be enjoying something of a respite from her lifelong anxiety disorder. But read any of the darkly amusing passages from her new book and it’s clear that unease is her status quo — she’ll be back there soon enough. The native Angeleno, daughter of Curb Your Enthusiasm creator-star Larry David and activist Laurie David, hopes to translate the success she’s had as a columnist and writer of web shorts into proper series work. And while she’s well aware of how family connections can help her with that, she has one obstacle those without Hollywood lineage…

Summer has come late (or perhaps early?) to HBO Max with the arrival of the lively new thriller-dramedy series The Flight Attendant. A fast-moving mystery anchored by Kaley Cuoco’s versatile lead performance, it’s the small-screen equivalent of a beach read, pure and simple — though the show’s accomplishment is actually not so simple, given that most shows of this type tend to get weighted down by either the clumsiness of broadcast storytelling or the pretensions of cable prestige. The Flight Attendant seems happy to be enjoyed and disposed of; it’s got a confidence of identity that I appreciated. Adapted from Chris Bohjalian’s novel by Steve Yockey (Supernatural), the series tells the story of Cassie Bowden (Cuoco), who flies international routes for Imperial Atlantic alongside a saucy crew including Rosie Perez’s…

For fans of global TV, the International Emmys are the Burning Man of awards season. For years, the event, held in New York each November, was the only place where the sort of series loved by international TV binge watchers — Scandinavian noir, Asian horror or Israeli spy dramas — got celebrated. The world, of course, has changed. Such international shows as Dark (Gothic German sci-fi), Borgen (Danish political drama) and Kingdom (Korean period horror) have become global hits. But for the true hipsters of foreign television on the hunt for the next big thing, the International Emmys is still the first port of call. What else but the International Emmys would nominate cutting-edge French miniseries The Collapse — an apocalyptic horror tale done not in Walking Dead mode but…