Innholdsfortegnelse for February 3, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

After two months of fielding criticism from some of Hollywood’s top filmmakers, WarnerMedia executives finally had something to crow about when AT&T CEO John Stankey revealed Jan. 27 that the much-maligned plan to release its films in theaters and on HBO Max had helped to double the streamer’s audience to 17.2 million active users. But the good news came with a caveat: $520 million in losses due to the ongoing shutdown of many theaters and subsequent hybrid release plan for the 2021 Warner Bros. film slate. The next day, NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell touted Peacock’s 33 million signups but conceded that the 9-month-old streamer would lose $2 billion in 2020 and 2021. The shift to streaming was always going to be expensive. When Disney revealed plans to forgo licensing deals…

It has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood revenge thriller. A group of regular Joe day traders coordinate to upend the stock market through chats on Reddit and TikTok, boosting the share price of companies struggling amid the pandemic and causing hedge funds to lose billions — largely through an investment site aptly named Robinhood. That’s what happened in late January when hedge funds borrowed shares of GameStop and AMC Entertainment stock and then sold them, anticipating that the price per share would fall. The expectation was to buy back the shares at a cheaper price, return them to the lender and pocket the difference. But here, individual traders bought in en masse, driving up the stock prices substantially. Since the hedge funds borrowed the shares, they had to buy…

International Feature Hope News broke Jan. 28 that Maria Sodahl’s drama about a couple dealing with the wife’s brain cancer — which is Norway’s submission — is being adapted into an English-language series for Amazon, with Nicole Kidman set to executive produce and star. Songs of Solomon Angling to be the first Armenian entry ever nominated, the film, a biopic about composer Komitas set amid the backdrop of the Armenian genocide, had a heavily subscribed virtual screening hosted by the Museum of Tolerance on Feb. 1, followed by a Q&A with director Arman Nshanian. Supporting Actor Jared Leto The Little Things His creepy performance in this Warner Bros. crime thriller, which topped the box office in its opening weekend, was promoted with a Jan. 30 Q&A moderated by his Dallas…

High five!” the American Film Institute congratulated 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan as it bestowed an AFI Award for one of the 10 best films of that year on the transgressive comedy, adding, “The joy of the film is that no ivory tower is too tall for Borat. He targets Christians and Jews, feminists and frat boys, and all the while offering a global catharsis; for if we can laugh together, we can live together.” In retrospect, that now-we-can-all-get-along platitude certainly looks like wishful thinking, but there was no denying that the first Borat, in which prankster Sacha Baron Cohen donned a Groucho-esque mustache to travel across America in the character of Kazakhstan journalist Borat Sagdiyev, was greeted as a worthy awards…

When brothers Mychael and Jeff Danna were approached by director Dan Scanlon to compose the music for Pixar’s Onward — which follows teenage elf brothers Barley (Chris Pratt) and Ian (Tom Holland), who embark on a mystical quest to reunite with their late father — the duo immediately felt as if fate had brought the project their way. The two composers didn’t know anything about the project before their meeting with Scanlon and the Onward team. “As [Dan Scanlon is] pitching this story, the hairs on the back of our necks are just going up,” Mychael tells THR. “Because this is really familiar personal territory for us.” The Oscar winner, who earned a statuette for his solo work on Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, describes their 1970s upbringing in the…

MANK Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies Seyfried wore platinum bobbed wigs while makeup department head Gigi Williams applied makeup “somewhere between [Davies’] oncamera looks and our idea of her off-camera look.” Adds assistant makeup department head Michelle Audrina Kim, “Working in black-and-white, it was key for us to shift our perspective of doing makeup; from picking products and colors not necessarily based on the color/hue, but on tonal value.” Williams notes that for the director’s 1940-set film, David Fincher “didn’t want [her eyebrows] to be as skinny as the style was in that period … To create the same feel of thin brows we elongated her brows out to almost the outside corner of her eye and rounded it almost to a half-moon shape. The perfect combination of customized eyelashes…

ANIMATED SHORTS BURROW A rabbit embarks on a journey to dig the burrow of her dreams, despite not knowing what she’s doing, in this Pixar SparksShort. IF ANYTHING HAPPENS I LOVE YOU Made in partnership with Everytown for Gun Safety and released on Netflix, this short follows two parents as they mourn the loss of a child. LOOP Two kids at canoe camp (including Pixar’s first nonverbal autistic character) find themselves adrift on a lake, unable to move forward until they find a new way to connect and see the world through each other’s eyes. OUT Part of Pixar’s SparkShorts lineup, this short follows a young man whose life is full of love, but he hasn’t yet told his parents he’s gay. THE SNAIL AND THE WHALE Based on the…

Is it fairer to compare CBS’ Clarice to Thomas Harris’ novels? To Jonathan Demme’s Oscarwinning The Silence of the Lambs or Ridley Scott’s big-screen semisequel Hannibal? To Bryan Fuller’s operatic NBC drama Hannibal or Brett Ratner’s middling movie Red Dragon? Bits and pieces of this brand have been pulled apart and stitched back together over the years with a persistence that Buffalo Bill might appreciate. The bar for success is either extremely high or reassuringly low, so naturally Clarice ends up somewhere right in the middle, judging from the three episodes sent to critics. In Clarice Starling, creators Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet have a character with ample untapped depths, and their approach to the trauma stemming from what she endured in Silence of the Lambs is admirably complex. But…

During the early days of the pandemic, the prospect of workers suing businesses for not protecting them from the virus was so great that many corporations lobbied for tort protection, aiming to be shielded from negligence claims. And yet there have been few actual lawsuits from the nation’s labor force. Certainly none in Hollywood. That is, until Jan. 15, when Timothy Hearl became the first actor to sue entertainment employers over COVID-19 working conditions. Unexpectedly, Netflix is one of the defendants in this suit after having made an under-the-radar jump into live entertainment last year with Stranger Things: The Drive Into Experience. That drive-in show allows fans of the Netflix series to navigate their vehicles through a parking lot styled as the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, in 1985, where…

When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs square off at Raymond James Stadium on Feb. 7, there’ll be no shortage of stars on the field thanks to A-list QBs Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes and an entertainment lineup that includes halftime performer The Weeknd, as well as poet Amanda Gorman and Miley Cyrus, who’s headlining an NFL TikTok Tailgate event. Beyond the sidelines? Not so much. Super Bowl LV is shaping up to be a modest celebration thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. That means the jet-set crowd of influencers, movie stars, athletes and musicians who typically make the trek to Super Bowl weekend is largely taking a pass. Some insiders say they already are looking ahead to L.A. hosting the big game in 2022, when the virus is…

Bert Fields: Why I Haven’t Left the Office Work from home? Not Bert Fields. The iconic legal eagle has bucked the remote work trend that set in throughout the industry once the COVID-19 pandemic put a stranglehold on offices in March. Fields, at 91, remains committed to going into Greenberg Glusker’s Century City offices, where he apparently has been the only one. Fields confirmed by email to THR, writing simply: “It’s true. I can be more efficient in the office.” Asked in a follow-up whether he received the vaccine, he says: “Not yet. I’m awaiting my turn on principle.” Fields’ tireless work ethic is detailed in his 2020 tome, Summing Up: A Professional Memoir, which tracks his career and notable client list that has included The Beatles, Warren Beatty, Tom…

Seven-time Oscar-nominated sound pro Ren Klyce, who was born in Japan and moved to Northern California at a young age with his parents, traveled all the way from 1940s Hollywood to an ethereal afterlife in the course of his work as supervising sound editor and rerecording mixer on his two most recent films, Netflix’s Mank and Pixar’s Soul. (He’s also credited as sound designer on Soul.) Klyce has been friends with Mank director David Fincher since they were teenagers and has worked on all of Fincher’s features. The two met working on the George Lucas-produced Twice Upon a Time and, remembers Klyce: “We kind of clung to each other because we were the youngest people on the crew. David was doing visual effects. I was an art assistant back then.”…

In addition to cleaning out closets and sampling a variety of at-home workouts, the safer-at-home order has provided many people the opportunity to indulge in a high dose of self-care. But, if the “Touch Up My Appearance” filter on Zoom just isn’t cutting it, there’s no shame in a little doctor-assisted fine-tuning. “Our office remains extremely busy with stringent COVID-19 safety protocols in place,” says Kay Durairaj, a facial artist and cosmetic surgeon whose clients include TikTok stars who regularly appear in her Instagram stories (@beautybydrkay) while experiencing everything from cheek-contouring fillers to skintightening facials. Says Durairaj, “Treating yourself to natural enhancements by a highly skilled medical expert will give you a more refreshed appearance and instill confidence.” TO GET RID OF BROWN SPOTS AND PIGMENTATION: BBL HERO For those…

It was in Venice and Cate Blanchett was playing hooky. Escaping from her duties as jury president for the 2020 Venice International Film Festival, the Oscarwinning actress snuck off to check out some of the films screening outside the festival’s main competition. That’s when she saw Apples, the debut film from Greek director Christos Nikou, which opened Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar. The dramedy, about a world hit by a pandemic of amnesia, struck a chord. “Two chords, actually,” says Blanchett. “The film is about the things I’ve been preoccupied with, particularly at the moment we are all in now, of how love and grief are unforgettable and how one copes with the loss of the familiar.” Apples is an oddball fable set in an entirely analog world struck by a disease…

Christopher Nolan has always been “very committed to filming as much as he can in camera,” VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson says, adding that in the case of Tenet, the director went as far as buying a retired 747 and crashing it into a set on location in Victorville, California. “We had a tow rope from the plane through the set, attached to a couple of big tow trucks. We literally dragged it in,” he relates. “[Special effects supervisor] Scott Fisher and the SFX people had to put 747 brakes back on the wheels so that they could stop it at the point where it needed to stop. It did go a little farther than it was meant to, but that just made it more exciting.” Jackson, who works out of…

When the house lights came up after a performance of Kemp Powers’ One Night in Miami, producers Keith and Jess Wu Calder realized the play they’d just seen was the perfect source material for a film. “Pretty much the next day we tracked down Kemp,” Keith says of his initial excitement for the project after seeing the 2013 production at Los Angeles’ Rogue Machine Theatre that earned three L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards. At the time, he says the Calders were drawn to “discussing and finding ways to deal with [civil rights struggles in America] in ways that can be entertaining but also open people’s eyes to structural and institutional problems.” Powers’ play fit squarely within that mission. Taking place Feb. 25, 1964, One Night in Miami brings together four…

The modern communal pop extravaganza known as the Super Bowl halftime show can trace its roots to Jan. 31, 1993, when Michael Jackson took the stage at the Rose Bowl for Super Bowl XXVII, where the Dallas Cowboys would trample the Buffalo Bills, 52-17. Before that, the halftime show was mostly an afterthought, occupied by college marching bands, Up With People and fading acts like Mickey Rooney (XXI) and Chubby Checker (XXII). In 1992, Fox lured 22 percent of the audience from NBC by counter-programming a special episode of In Living Color during halftime, and the NFL realized it had to up its game. It turned to Radio City Productions to mount something spectacular, which in turn offered the slot to Jackson. He asked for $1 million, a seeming bargain,…

Non-English-language TV series used to be a niche proposition, with a handful of international shows making it to the U.S. But the success of Netflix’s global titles — from Spain’s Money Heist to Kingdom from South Korea to French hit Lupin — and a need for streamers to quickly build their libraries is leading to a buying frenzy. Drama series Losing Alice, which premiered on Israel’s Hot 3 network last summer, was scooped up by Apple TV+ and bowed Jan. 22. Alice is the second big show from Israel for Apple — the first, thriller Tehran, a co-production with Israeli broadcaster Kan 1, just received a second-season order. WarnerMedia’s HBO Max secured U.S. premieres for the likes of Spanish series Veneno, about Spanish trans TV personality Cristina Ortiz; Italian mob…

Mike Nichols had been a guest at Mark Harris’ wedding to writer Tony Kushner, and the couple had dined with the filmmaker many times since Nichols directed the 2003 HBO adaptation of Kushner’s play Angels in America. But when Harris’ book publisher, Penguin Press, approached the journalist and author to write a biography of Nichols after the director’s death, “I knew that there was a ton I didn’t know,” Harris says. “And I knew I would never not be interested.” Six years later, Harris’ Mike Nichols: A Life is out. Based on 250 interviews with actors and collaborators including Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman and Elaine May, Harris’ book traces Nichols’ extraordinary life — from his boyhood trip from Germany to the U.S. in 1939, through his young adult fame as…

During the six months in 1995 when Pierce Brosnan dodged explosions inside England’s Leavesden Studios for GoldenEye, a propmaster consistently delivered packets of earplugs. While the James Bond actor made good use of them on set, he found another application in his dressing room. “I set up the easel,” Brosnan says, “and this image on the back of the earplugs came to me, and I thought I would try to render it in the vein of Roy Lichtenstein.” The result was a 48 x 48-inch acrylic painting. For the first time in his prolific painting career, Brosnan is offering 100 limited-edition silkscreen prints through L.A. gallery Seasons. The 28 x 28-inch prints — presented in a linen-bound folio and produced by Kevin Giffen and Daniel Wlazlak of Wranch Studio and…

In a span of three months, Jesse Collins is producing the Super Bowl halftime show with The Weeknd (Feb. 7), the Grammy Awards (March 14) and the Oscars (April 25). In the best of years, that would be an ambitious trio. In 2021, with constantly evolving COVID-19 restrictions, it’s borderline masochistic. “I try not to think about it as a collective,” he says with a nervous laugh. It was Collins’ ability to pull off last June’s BET Awards, the first pandemic-era marquee TV event not filmed over Zoom, that convinced Hollywood the 50-year-old could tackle three of TV’s top tentpoles with similar limitations — and bigger expectations. It’s a coup for the Washington, D.C.-area native, who formed his eponymous production company in 2012. The father of three, who got his…

Mads Mikkelsen met Thomas Vinterberg on his first job as a working actor. Mikkelsen, still in drama school, was cast in The Glass House Prisoner, a 40-minute short film set in a Danish prison. Vinterberg was the assistant director. “We shot in jail, most of the cast were real criminals, it was very intense,” Mikkelsen recalls. “And there was this young guy — pretty blond hair” — it was Vinterberg, directing the inmates as extras — “I said: ‘You can’t talk to them like that. They’ll rip your head off. And kill me, too.’ ” Both got out alive. But it would be 15 years before two of the biggest stars in European cinema would work together again — on Vinterberg’s Oscar-nominated drama The Hunt (2012), with Mikkelsen playing a…

Taghi Amirani COUP 53 (IRAN) “For someone who took 10 years to make a documentary about the 1953 CIA/MI6 coup in Iran, Trump and his Iran policy mistakes were a gift. My editor, Walter Murch, and I followed his every move in the cutting room as we shaped the film. He even features in the most surreal final scene. As an Iranian, I hope Biden picks up where Obama left off with the Iran deal.” Jean-Philippe Duval 14 DAYS, 12 NIGHTS (CANADA) “As a filmmaker, and also as your closest neighbor, I feel there’s a fresh wind of optimism for the artistic world. I feel that dialogues are again open and it inspires in me a hope for a vibrant, authentic future.” Sarmad Sultan Khoosat CIRCUS OF LIFE (PAKISTAN) “It’s…

There’s a short scene in Notturno, Gianfranco Rosi’s new documentary and Italy’s submission for the 93rd Academy Awards, that illustrates the director’s patience. A woman scrolls through audio messages on her phone. “When you hear this, answer me right away or ISIS will be listening.” The messages are from her daughter, kidnapped by ISIS. It took Rosi three years to get that shot. Three years from when he first went to Iraq to begin shooting Notturno and met the husband of the kidnapped woman, to the moment, in an apartment in Stuttgart, Germany, where he met the woman’s mother. “At a certain point, the scene became so emotional and we understand that the daughter is not there anymore, that this was her last phone call, her last scream for help,”…

CODA Revolving around a hearing teen (Emilia Jones, wonderful) and the tensions that arise when her passion for singing pulls her away from her deaf parents and brother (Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, Daniel Durant), this remake of a 2014 French film is a deeply satisfying heartwarmer. The movie — which sold to Apple for $25 million, a Sundance record — sticks close to the feel-good playbook, but writer-director Sian Heder flaunts a finely tuned sense of when to push, how much, and when to pull back. You may roll your eyes. More likely, you’ll be wiping them. — JON FROSCH FLEE Danish writer-director Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s boldly genre-defying film mixes hand-drawn animation with archival footage to trace the harrowing history and psychological scars of an Afghan man hiding from his…