Innholdsfortegnelse for January 13, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

Over the past quarter-century, for better or worse, one law has played an outsized role in the vibrant internet we know today. Yet amid the fallout of the Capitol Hill riot on Jan. 6, calls to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act have grown louder. Some lawmakers complain about the spew of hatred and legion of disinformation. Others detest the power of Big Tech to choose whose voice is loudest on platforms seen as akin to town squares. Politicians on both sides of the aisle hold up a repeal of Section 230 as the appropriate response to everything from the Capitol insurrection to the suspension of Donald Trump’s Twitter account two days later. Unfortunately, a Section 230 repeal won’t be enough to achieve what some political leaders…

Movie theater chains are staring down an unprecedented crisis, as pandemic shutdowns are forcing operators in some areas to close while awaiting local authorities’ COVID-19 guidance. So it was no surprise that when Marcus Corp. — the fourth-largest circuit in the U.S., with 1,110 screens in 17 states — reported its latest financials on Nov. 3, CFO Doug Neis told investors the pandemic had led to “the two worst quarters we’ve ever experienced in our 85-year history.” Marcus stock fell 58 percent in 2020, while shares of the nation’s largest chain, AMC, dropped 71 percent and rival Cinemark’s closed off at 49 percent. But Wall Street observers are notably bullish on the Wisconsin-based Marcus when a pandemic recovery arrives, given its tradition of conservative financial management. The Marcus Corp., which…

As the hearing of punk-metal musician Ruben, played by Riz Ahmed, deteriorates in the Amazon drama Sound of Metal, director Darius Marder deftly delivers the drummer’s aural point of view. Planning began early with supervising sound editor and designer Nicolas Becker — whose work as a Foley artist included Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and who sound-designed 2016 Cannes Jury Prize winner American Honey — and it involved extensive research with individuals who have experienced hearing loss as well as other consultants. Becker, who lives in France, and the director visited Paris’ Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), a facility dedicated to music and sound research founded by French composer Pierre Boulez. “They have a chamber where you hear absolutely nothing, then after five minutes you can start to hear…

When asked how the recession and pandemic have affected L.A.’s commercial real estate market, Ryan Patap, director of analytics at data group CoStar, is blunt: “It’s bad. Over the past two quarters, we’ve seen vacancy rise at its fastest pace in more than a decade.” According to a December CoStar report, the market vacancy in L.A. stands at 12.2 percent, up nearly 2 percent year-over-year. Rents have declined 1.2 percent, the first slip in nine years. Certain neighborhoods have been hit particularly hard. In Hollywood, according to CoStar, vacancies have risen to 16.5 percent from 6.2 percent in 2018. Conversely, sales in the area have jumped to an all-time high, with Blackstone buying a 49 percent stake in Hudson Pacific Properties’ Hollywood soundstages and creative spaces — more than 1.2…

In Focus Features’ Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Sidney Flanigan stars as Autumn, a pregnant 17-year-old in rural Pennsylvania who is in desperate need of an abortion. Restricted from obtaining the procedure in her home state without her parents’ consent — and sidelined when the counselors at a local pregnancy crisis center attempt to persuade her not to have an abortion — she and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) embark on a journey to New York City so that Autumn can receive the care she needs. Writer-director Eliza Hittman, whose film unfolds like an emotional roller coaster as the two teenagers navigate their way through an overwhelming city, spoke to THR about writing believable young characters, her extensive and immersive research process, and how she followed newcomer Flanigan online for years…

Since his 1995 Sundance breakout The Brothers McMullen, writer-director-star Edward Burns has made small, character-driven films and a short-lived TV show, TNT’s Public Morals. His new work, Epix’s Bridge and Tunnel, is a nostalgia-bathed coming-of-age dramedy series set on Long Island circa 1980. It should have been a movie: Somewhere in these six half-hour episodes, there’s a pleasurably lowkey 85-minute feature just waiting to be excavated. It’s the story of longtime buds Jimmy (Sam Vartholomeos), Jill (Caitlin Stasey), Tammy (Gigi Zumbado), Mikey (Jan Luis Castellanos), Pags (Brian Muller) and Stacey (Isabella Farrell), reunited for one last summer of fun after college graduation. They all have their eyes on the future — Jimmy as a photographer, Jill as a fashion designer, Pags as a lawyer, etc. — and they’re all hung…

With COVID-19 cases showing no sign of abating, organizers of Hollywood awards shows and global film festivals are grappling with whether to postpone or scuttle their planned industry events. On Jan. 5, Sundance opted for a version of the latter by canceling its Los Angeles-area drive-in screenings because of a spike in COVID-19 cases in Southern California. That move came on the heels of the Grammys’ postponement of its Jan. 31 ceremony. The SAG Awards, which are scheduled to take place March 14 — the same date now claimed by the Grammys — may be the next to move, sources say, while the Feb. 28 Golden Globes are a question mark. When Sundance pulled the plug on its planned outdoor screenings, it caught some filmmakers off guard. The festival sent…

FILM Ben Affleck (WME, Ziffren Brittenham) will direct and co-write an adaptation of the book series Keeper of the Lost Cities for Disney. Loki exec producer Michael Waldron (CAA, LBI, Goodman Genow) will write a Kevin Feige-produced Star Wars feature project for Disney. Ben Hardy (UTA, the U.K.’s CAM, Untitled) and Rob Delaney (UTA, Avalon, Brecheen Feldman) have joined Haley Lu Richardson in ACE Entertainment romance feature The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. Vera Farmiga (CAA, Authentic, Peikoff Mahan) will star in and produce horror fairy tale Bad Bloom, Bryce McGuire’s feature directorial debut. Idris Elba (WME, the U.K.’s Arists Partnership, M88) and his Green Door Pictures have struck a TV and film deal with producer Kris Thykier’s Archery Pictures. Stana Katic (Gersh, Principal, Nelson Davis) and Matt…

mid the last gasps and bellows of the Trump presidency, it seems no place is immune to recent spikes in outgoing MAGA madness — not even deeply blue Los Angeles County. Over the past few weeks, numerous sites across the city have been converted into ideological battlegrounds pitting maskless, Trump-supporting agitators against, well, everyone else, even as more than 7,000 people are hospitalized for COVID-19 around the L.A. area and ambulances are being told not to bring in patients unlikely to survive. The most publicized of these were the Christmas caroling events organized by actor Kirk Cameron, where attendees flouted mask-wearing and social distancing guidelines. On Dec. 30, evangelical Christian singer Sean Feucht staged one of his largely maskless concerts near DTLA’s Skid Row that was met with protesters chanting,…

Sober Stars Step Into Spotlight Amid Rise in Drinking, Overdoses The start of a new year always arrives with New Year’s resolutions met by the voluntary tradition of “Dry January,” a month marked by abstaining from alcohol. But 2021 has made for a rare mix of the above as a global pandemic has led to a rise in alcohol sales and drug overdoses, per recent studies. That said, sobriety has received generous PR in recent days from stars, among them Anthony Hopkins (who celebrated 45 years clean), Chrissy Teigen (who was inspired by the book Quit Like a Woman), French Montana and Rumer Willis. “Any time celebrities, who appear to have it all, reveal they too had to face truths about their need to use alcohol or another substance to…

Those who deal with Peter Levinsohn, colleagues and rivals alike, unanimously describe him as whip-smart and consumer savvy. The business strategist rose through the studio system on the distribution and digital side and in February was promoted to vice chairman and chief distribution officer of Universal Filmed Entertainment, reporting to studio chairman Donna Langley and overseeing about 1,200 employees worldwide. Little could he have imagined that mere months later, amid the pandemic, he’d take the lead in forging a historic deal with AMC Theatres to shrink the theatrical window to as few as 17 days and create a new premium VOD window (a pact with Cinemark quickly followed). New York-born Levinsohn previously spent 25 years at 20th Century Fox — one of his first gigs was selling movies to airlines…

Pete Docter felt something was missing in his life. The Pixar veteran had risen to the top of the animation world, having won Oscars for his innovative, heartfelt work in 2009’s Up and 2015’s Inside Out, but, he admits, he found himself thinking, “This isn’t really making everything all fulfilled and settled. It’s not like everything has come into place, even though I’m very lucky to have the success that I’ve been a part of at Pixar.” He began asking himself, “How am I living my life, or is there a way in which we should be living?” And as he pondered those questions, the spark behind his new feature, Soul, was ignited. Pixar’s 23rd animated feature — because of the pandemic, the $150 million production skipped theaters, debuting Christmas…

Last fall, as restaurants in L.A. faced an endless wave of changing COVID-19 restrictions, nine female restaurateurs from across the city started a virtual meetup. “We needed a place to vent, a sounding board to just talk,” says Hotville Chicken owner Kim Prince. Those discussions evolved into the sharing of resources and grant information. “Some ladies have six locations and 300 employees and now they’re down to 40. Hearing things like that gave me some comfort and allowed me to breathe and recognize, ‘OK, I’m not the only one struggling, we’re all struggling and we’re all going to get through this.’ ” Those women now sit on the board of RE:Her, a nonprofit centered on women-owned restaurants in L.A. On Jan. 21, RE:Her will launch its debut 10-day food festival…

Two of the earliest signs that Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite would take the golden brick road to its best picture Oscar last awards season came when it was anointed 2019’s best picture by both the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics. (The rival New York Film Critics Circle opted instead to hand its best picture prize to Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, but then the three prominent critics’ groups almost make it a point of pride never to agree with one another.) The previous season, though, offered a different story, with the critics’ voices seemingly having little impact on the outcome of the Oscar contest. While both the Los Angeles and New York critics agreed that Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma was that year’s outstanding film, and…

THE HOSTS OF POD SAVE AMERICA had planned to use their Jan. 7 show to talk about the Senate wins that the Democratic Party had just pulled off in the Georgia runoff election. Instead, when host Jon Favreau turned on his mic, it was to tell his listeners that “we have been robbed of the joy from those victories by a mob of violent extremists who were encouraged to stage an insurrection against the United States government by the man who was supposed to be leading it.” Dan Pfeiffer, his co-host that day, described the Capitol Hill riot as “an incredibly sad day for democracy.” Pod Save America, which regularly ranks among the top 25 shows on Apple’s podcast chart, has spent the past four years voicing the frustrations and…

Kevin Macdonald has sensational nonfiction material in The Mauritanian, based on the bestselling memoir Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who spent 14 years incarcerated at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba without ever being charged with a crime. Macdonald is an excellent documentary maker (Whitney, Marley) with a more uneven record in narrative features (The Last King of Scotland is probably the best among them). This procedural is strangely flat and methodical to a fault despite a gripping turn from Tahar Rahim as Slahi. The movie is clear in indicting George W. Bush, who authorized interrogation methods in violation of human rights, but also the Obama administration that failed to close the detention center (even if the film never really addresses the congressional challenges that blocked Barack Obama’s commitment…

January was significant for The Supremes. It was on Jan. 21, 1961, that the group — then a quartet of 15-year-olds from Detroit called The Primettes — was signed to Berry Gordy Jr.’s Motown Records, setting it on a path to superstardom. And it was on Jan. 14, 1970, that the group — by then a trio billed as Diana Ross & the Supremes (minus Florence Ballard, who was replaced by Cindy Birdsong in 1967 after struggling with alcoholism) — performed a final show at the New Frontier in Las Vegas. “We sat outside Motown every day until one of the producers came out and said, ‘You know what, we need some background hand claps,’ ” recalls Supreme Mary Wilson, 76, of the early days. When Gordy saw how “serious”…