Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 17B July 2020 i The Hollywood Reporter

Time (and our perspective looking back on it) is often analogized as a telescope, but since March 11 — Tom Hanks’ COVID-19 diagnosis, NBA suspension, etc. — time has become more of a kaleidoscope, a jumble of shifting blobs in the foreground, anything in the distance a blur. What that means for Emmy Awards purposes is that this year there are two distinctly different eligibility windows: shows that launched between June 1, 2019, and March 11, 2020, and shows that aired between March 12 and May 31, 2020. It’s hard enough to keep track of the dozens of things that premiered in the second window, but shows in the first can feel like memory fragments from a different age. This isn’t great, because Emmy deadlines already create their own disorienting…

• When Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor first collaborated with Atticus Ross on the score for David Fincher’s The Social Network, the duo likely didn’t anticipate a prolific career in film — much less an Academy Award for their first joint effort. But in the decade since, the pair have composed scores for Ken Burns’ docuseries The Vietnam War, the upcoming Pixar feature Soul, and three Fincher films including the director’s much-anticipated biopic Mank, about Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. While they have alternated between film and their work in Nine Inch Nails (Ross, who has produced the band’s albums since 2005, officially joined the lineup in 2016), they’ve kept a healthy boundary between their film work and their band’s output. For HBO’s Watchmen, however, Reznor and Ross dug…

To bring Jon Favreau’s Star Wars-themed The Mandalorian to Disney+, the VFX team combined a new virtual production pipeline with classic techniques used in the original Star Wars trilogy. That included the decision to forgo the CG character route and bring the adorable character called The Child — best known to fans as “Baby Yoda” —to the screen with the help of puppeteers. Season one was shot at Manhattan Beach Studios, across three stages and the backlot. A large wraparound LED screen onstage displayed completed set extensions to enable the filmmakers to shoot scenes in camera. This virtual production system, which shared similarities with the one developed to make Favreau’s The Lion King, uses a real-time gaming engine (in this case, Epic’s Unreal Engine) to display the environments on the screen.…

• STRANGER THINGS Rerecording mixers Will Files (War for the Planet of the Apes), Mark Paterson (an Oscar winner for Les Misérables) and Craig Henighan (Roma) all brought feature-film backgrounds to the climactic episode of the Netflix sci-fi series’ third season. The team wanted to deliver what felt like big-budget Hollywood sound, and a key aspect of that was conveying scale. “We had a giant monster, and it had to sound like it was the biggest, loudest thing you ever heard,” Files says. “How can you do that when you can’t rely on tricks in the cinema?” One way to suggest size was to add low-end bass. Additionally, “tasteful distortion can go a long way if you want to suggest size, [suggesting] the thing is so big and so loud,…

On the first season of Homecoming, director Sam Esmail set a lofty template with a notably lengthy one-take sequence in the cinematic tradition of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Robert Altman. For the distinctly more expansive second season of the Amazon series, director Kyle Patrick Alvarez picked up the baton, staging a complicated and mesmerizing single-shot scene for the second episode in which amnesiac “Jackie” (Janelle Monáe), desperate to uncover her own identity and real name, follows clues leading to the home of Audrey Temple (Hong Chau), one of the few returning characters from the previous season. As the camera tracks Jackie’s stealthy approach outside the house, Audrey is inside and visibly pacing through various rooms while on a phone call, revealing tantalizing hints that could prove crucial to Jackie’s…

For the ambitious productions in the current golden age of television, it’s not uncommon to see filmmakers crossing over between features and shortform narratives — and that certainly holds true in cinematography. This season’s Emmy contenders include Frederick Elmes, whose credits with longtime collaborator David Lynch include Blue Velvet and who earlier this year received the American Society of Cinematographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award. He’s also a 2017 Emmy winner for The Night Of. Among his fellow Emmy hopefuls are Jeff Cronenweth (son of Blade Runner DP Jordan Cronenweth), a longtime collaborator with David Fincher who earned Oscar nominations for the director’s The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; and Paul Cameron, a BAFTA winner for Michael Mann’s Collateral (shared with Dion Beebe). Elmes, who lensed the pilot…

• THE CROWN The Netflix drama’s third season includes a heartbreaking episode centering on the 1966 collapse of a coal-mine spoil tip, or mountain of waste, in Aberfan, Wales, which claimed the lives of 144 residents, mostly children. Some live action was filmed in Wales, and additional scenes used greenscreen and were shot on a set at Elstree Studios in London. VFX supervisor Ben Turner says the team studied archival material and topography to simulate the slide and scenes of the aftermath. • HOMELAND The Showtime drama’s final season was primarily set in Kabul, Afghanistan, but many of the live-action scenes were filmed in and around Morocco. The VFX team added a “wraparound view” of Kabul’s defining mountain range to the shots, explains senior VFX supervisor Rocco Passionino of Zoic…

WATCHMEN ‘HAS ALWAYS BEEN RELEVANT’ Editors David Eisenberg, Anna Hauger and Henk Van Eeghen discuss their collaborative process and share their favorite moments from HBO’s powerful limited series. ‘Watching the dailies was riveting, heart-wrenching and tear-inducing’ Based on DC Comics’ graphic novel about masked vigilantes, Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen offers an alternative American history that begins with the Tulsa race massacre in 1921. The HBO limited series was cut by a trio of editors — David Eisenberg, Anna Hauger and Henk Van Eeghen — all of whom previously worked on Lindelof’s The Leftovers, so they “came into this series with established trust and rapport, which was tremendously helpful,” says Van Eeghen. How did you collaborate in order to tell a consistent story from episode to episode? DAVID EISENBERG It really came…

In 2011, the Emmys added two new awards to recognize the programming that had begun to proliferate on platforms like YouTube but had significantly shorter run times than most TV shows. The short-format Emmys got off to a slow start, with just four nominees filling out the categories. The digital video business has exploded in the decade since, and the short-form Emmys (as the categories were renamed in 2016) have expanded into five live-action categories to reflect the torrent of eligible new shows. The categories have remained less competitive than their traditional TV counterparts, but that could change this year as a cadre of deeppocketed platforms join the Emmy race with contenders that seem far less beholden to the 30-minute or 60-minute formats that once defined the television landscape. Leading…

Music was front and center in a number of this year’s Emmy contenders, from a gritty drama about a Paris jazz club (The Eddy) to a sunny dramedy that finds its characters bursting into Top 40 hits (Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist). More than just accompanying the action or setting the tone for emotional scenes, music is essential to the DNA of these series, often setting their course in the earliest stages of development. Whether the characters are musicians themselves, professional connoisseurs or just young people overflowing with feeling, music helps viewers understand who they are and what they’re going through. Music supervisors from four of this season’s music-driven series spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about crafting their particular blends of music and storytelling. • THE EDDY Jazz is the heart and…

• BIG LITTLE LIES John Paino Paino, who says he sees film and television as mediums to view new worlds and subcultures, was quite intrigued by the opportunity to home in on what “misty, melancholy” Monterey could offer as a setting for HBO’s Big Little Lies. Paino initially likened the series that follows the seemingly perfect lives of upper-class mothers in the quaint California beach town to the soapy Desperate Housewives, but soon saw how creator David E. Kelley and directors Jean-Marc Vallée and Andrea Arnold wanted to create a story that showed “something more than these people living in gorgeous homes.” Paino focused his production design on ensuring that each of the story’s central women — Celeste Wright (Nicole Kidman), Madeline Mackenzie (Reese Witherspoon), Renata Klein (Laura Dern), Bonnie…

• AVENUE 5 Suzie Harman The HBO comedy, about a space cruise ship that veers off course, is set 40 years in the future, but creator Armando Iannucci told Harman he didn’t want the fashion to be too out-of-this-world. “Forty, 50 years ago, we still wore jeans,” says Harman. “Our clothing hasn’t changed hugely — a bit of cuts and style and things have, but the essence of clothes hasn’t changed.” So Harman thought about what different age groups would wear aboard a cruise ship. For the younger crowd, she focused on high-end and luxury sportswear. “Because if you’re on a cruise ship, what do you take? You take your casual wear, a bit of sportswear, and you take your party outfit,” she says. “And you have your Hawaiian shirt.…

• HOLLYWOOD The sounds of period cars, cameras and film projectors were all part of creating Tinseltown during the late 1940s for Netflix’s Hollywood. Take, for example, the scenes set at the Golden Tip, a brothel fronted by a gas station, that were shot on location at a period auto repair shop in L.A.’s Atwater Village. Supervising sound editor Greg Megregian says his team had to replace the sounds of modern vehicles on nearby streets with those of period Buicks and Chevys. And a very specific sound for these scenes was the gas station’s customer bell. “We mostly had to use sound libraries. Technicolor’s sound library is extensive,” Megregian says. For scenes set on a studio lot, period filmmaking came to life with the mechanical sounds of specific film cameras…