Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 15B June 2020 i The Hollywood Reporter

On the rare occasions it’s featured on TV, a Jewish wedding can be shorthanded down to two elements: the breaking of a glass and somebody shouting, “Mazel tov!” This spring, however, several shows raised the Semitic nuptials bar. On Amazon’s Hunters, Holocaust survivors Murray (Saul Rubinek) and Mindy (Carol Kane) throw a wedding for their daughter. Sure, a glass was broken — under a chuppah, no less — and mazel tovs were declared, but actual Hebrew prayers are said! A full horah is danced! Al Pacino wears a kipah! Hold my Manischewitz, said Netflix’s Unorthodox. Esther (Shira Haas) and Yakov’s (Amit Rahav) wedding, conducted within an insular Hasidic community in Brooklyn, adds layers of praying, brings in dancing beyond the horah and even takes viewers inside the yichud, a specific…

CATE BLANCHETT PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY Conservative activist Schlafly gained notoriety as a rightwing anti-communist before unsuccessfully running for Congress in Illinois. Through her grassroots organizing of conservative women, she argued that the ERA would force women into the draft and interfere with alimony. “In the end,” said Blanchett at the 2020 TCAs, “how polarizing she became was the very thing that prevented her from getting in place in Reagan’s cabinet. It was definitely a challenge to find those nuances and not to play one note.” Schlafly’s fame, however, gave Blanchett an incredible archive of speeches and interviews to draw from. For Schlafly’s look, costume designer Bina Daigeler balanced the American housewife with the conservative activist. “I went [with] quite textured materials for the suits,” she tells THR. “They look a little…

Corey Finley had the Sundance experience that indie filmmakers dream of when his feature debut, Thoroughbreds, sold to Focus Features for a $5 million price tag. As a part of Finley’s search for a sophomore effort, his agent sent him Bad Education, Mike Makowsky’s Black List script about the fall of a Long Island school superintendent, Frank Tassone, at the center of the largest public school embezzlement scandal in American history. The jump from indie teen thriller to a white-collar true crime might not seem logical, but reading the script, Finley saw it as the right fit. “I know a lot of educators — my mom is in education, my brother is a teacher, I have done a lot of SAT tutoring — so I read the script and was…

When connecting with Jeff Goldblum over the phone to discuss his Disney+ series, The World According to Jeff Goldblum, the routine question-and-answer pattern went a little differently than expected. Gov. Gavin Newsom had just issued a stay-at-home order for California. After a brief discussion regarding how we were holding up, the Emmy-nominated actor, 67, quipped that he was happy to “have some activity” while home with his two children and wife. Pandemic etiquette talk transitioned to how his show — which boils down to watching Goldblum discover things in a way only Goldblum can — offers the kind of uplifting content the world needs right now. Each of the 12 episodes focuses on a topic most people love, from ice cream to sneakers to tattoos, with the effusive actor excitedly…

Three years after ABC’s Roots proved in 1977 what a ratings bonanza the multi-night format could deliver, Shogun ruled the realm of miniseries. When its 12 hours aired over five nights in 1980, Shogun gave NBC the highest weekly ratings in the network’s history. The $22 million production ($69 million today) was then TV’s most successful miniseries after Roots. (One in three televisions was tuned to at least part of the show.) The Hollywood Reporter said it offered “lofty romance, bloody battles, lovely ladies, ambitious men, wary friendships, betrayals, suicides and even time for some gently humorous, irrelevant incidents.” The series was based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Australian author James Clavell, who in his Hollywood screenwriting days had written 1958’s The Fly. (A far better…

After years of fielding offers to play Israeli secret agent Eli Cohen in various projects, Sacha Baron Cohen took on the task in Gideon Raff’s six-part Netflix series The Spy, which chronicles Eli Cohen’s life as a poor accountant who is recruited by Israeli intelligence to pose as Kamel, a rich Syrian businessman who infiltrates the Syrian government. Cohen, 48 (no relationship to the real-life figure he plays), opened up to THR about making the switch to drama, committing to months of research and relating to living a double life. Why was this a role you wanted to play? It’s a superhero story of sorts. He’s a deputy accountant in a supermarket who ends up becoming arguably the most successful spy of the 20th century. He’s a real version of…

Whodunit? That question has long animated true crime. But as crime documentaries — about murder in particular — have multiplied in recent years, so too have the approaches to telling such stories. For filmmakers seeking to transcend what can be a formulaic genre, the question of “Who?” has taken a back seat to “So what?” What do these stories about victims and perpetrators say about us as a society? And why does it matter? Questions like those drew director Matthew Galkin, 46, to journalist Ethan Brown’s 2016 book Murder in the Bayou: Who Killed the Women Known as the Jeff Davis Eight?, about the deaths of eight women in rural Louisiana from 2005 to 2009. With Brown’s help, Galkin turned Murder in the Bayou into a five-part series for Showtime,…

Despite growing up in Kenya, with a vibrant natural world “in our backyard,” Lupita Nyong’o says she learned plenty after she signed on to narrate the six-part Discovery Channel documentary Serengeti. Produced and directed by nature doc veteran John Downer and American Idol creator Simon Fuller, Serengeti chronicles daily life on the African plains, achieving a sense of intimacy with the natural world by following the film’s animal subjects for more than a year. A passionate animal rights activist who was honored in 2019 by the global conservation organization WildAid for her efforts to protect wild African elephants, Nyong’o says there are lessons to be learned just by “observing and listening” to nature. She talked to THR about the discoveries she made while working on Serengeti, including how gender dynamics…

THE APOLLO Weaving archival footage and performances, Roger Ross Williams’ doc (released Nov. 6 on HBO) showcases the NYC theater’s 85-year history with stories from the likes of Smokey Robinson and Patti LaBelle. THE BLACK GODFATHER The Reginald Hudlin-helmed pic (which hit Netflix on June 7) uncovers the life of music executive and mentor Clarence Avant, tracing his legacy and influence on notables from Barack Obama to Snoop Dogg. DIEGO MARADONA From Oscar winner Asif Kapadia, the film (which debuted on HBO in October) documents the highs and lows (and party-animal behavior) of the infamous Argentine soccer legend. THE KINGMAKER Centered on Imelda Marcos, the controversial former first lady of the Philippines, Showtime’s The Kingmaker (helmed by Lauren Greenfield) looks at the family’s history of corruption and indulgence.…

When Celeste Ng learned her novel Little Fires Everywhere would be adapted into a limited series for Hulu, she made a decision to let go. Instead of holding on to the story that lived in the pages she’d written, she recognized that translating the novel for television would require her to put her trust in other people. “It felt really important to me that the people who knew what they were doing be allowed to do it, and that the project be given enough space to become its own thing,” she says. Ng, 39, along with three other authors of novels turned into limited series — Sally Rooney, 29 (Normal People); William Landay, 56 (Defending Jacob); and Wally Lamb, 69 (I Know This Much Is True) — spoke with THR…

When Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt neared its ending, co-creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock didn’t want Kimmy’s (Ellie Kemper) story to conclude with a romance. “We definitely were not interested in her arc being toward finding love in the series,” Fey says of Kimmy becoming a successful author. “We wanted her to have the J.K. Rowling triumph.” But in Netflix’s first interactive comedy special, Kimmy vs. the Reverend, viewers find Kemper’s protagonist, now a best-selling author, planning her wedding to Prince Frederick (Daniel Radcliffe). As she prepares to walk down the aisle, Kimmy also takes on her kidnapper, the Rev. Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm), which Fey says offers a “movie-scale level of action and drama” while also addressing “something we had left unresolved in the series.” Fey and…

In early 2016, Innocence Project founders Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck received a call from an unusual source: Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel, who was reaching out about a possible series. At the time, true-crime docuseries like Making a Murderer were finding a rabid audience on Netflix. Neufeld and Scheck’s organization, devoted to exonerating individuals wrongly convicted, seemed ripe to yield dramatic stories. The two attorneys had already fielded and dismissed some show ideas they considered either outlandish or inconsistent with their ideals, but Emanuel’s pitch came with the promise of creative control and eventually led to the Netflix miniseries The Innocence Files. The nine-episode mini is broken into three themes, each directed by a different documentary filmmaker. Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams takes on the junk science that has led…

“I thought they were playing a prank on me,” McMillions co-director James Lee Hernandez says of the first time the FBI set him up to talk with Doug Matthews, the larger-than-life special agent who became the breakout star of HBO’s six-part docuseries on the McDonald’s Monopoly game scam. “The second he walked in the room, it was like the cannons blared and the heavens crumbled and I was like, ‘All right, we’ve got something here.’ ” The scam, which ran from 1995 until it was busted in 2001, started when Jerry Jacobson — security director for the marketing company running the promotion for McDonald’s — rigged the game by giving out perhaps 60 winning peel-off stickers to people he knew, who would then give him a cut of the prize…

The weather in Ireland can be unpredictable — you never know when rain clouds might interrupt a perfectly sunny day — so it was a stroke of luck that Sept. 24, the last day of filming in Dublin for Normal People, was a mild one. At a makeshift cafe in the middle of the typically bustling Capel Street, it was Daisy Edgar-Jones who brought the chill as she shot a particularly tense scene with co-star Paul Mescal. The on-again, off-again couple they portray in Hulu and BBC Three’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s heady, acclaimed best-seller are clearly off-again. “You see the pain that Marianne can inflict on Connell, you know; she makes him feel incredibly anxious in that scene,” Edgar-Jones says, reflecting on the fraught moment, which comes after her…