Innholdsfortegnelse for February 10, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

On Feb. 4, a group of WME staffers convened in a conference online to discuss the escalating Armie Hammer situation. For the past three years, the agency’s client advisory committee has been tasked with determining the fate of those who are accused of misconduct. The group — evenly split along gender lines — has made difficult calls in the past, voting to drop high earners like X-Men director Bryan Singer and Arrow creator Andrew Kreisberg following claims of sexual misconduct and harassment. Hammer was facing a tsunami of critical and embarrassing press after an Instagram account dubbed House of Effie posted a series of direct messages and videos purported to be from Hammer that detailed cannibalistic and rape fantasies as well as drug use. Hammer already had been asked to…

Ending speculation about his future leading the news network, CNN president Jeff Zucker signed on to the daily editorial call Feb. 4 and made his intentions clear. “The truth is, back in November and December I had basically decided that it was time to move on,” Zucker said, sources tell THR, adding that he’d since “had a change of heart.” He told his employees he would remain at the helm of CNN through the end of 2021, at which point he expects to depart. Zucker’s decision gives CNN some stability, but it comes at what may be a tipping point for the global news brand. CNN has had blockbuster ratings the past few months, culminating in January, which was the most-watched month in the channel’s 40-year history, topping both Fox…

FILM Chloé Zhao (Ilene Feldman, Lichter Grossman) will write, direct and produce a sci-fi Western take on Dracula for Universal. Jon M. Chu (UTA, Artists First, Goodman Genow) will replace Stephen Daldry to direct Universal’s feature adaptation of Wicked. Watchmen’s Stacy Osei-Kuffour (CAA, McKuin Frankel) will write the script for Marvel Studios’ Blade, the Vampire Slayer. Zachary Levi (UTA, Untitled, McKuin Frankel) will star in Sony Pictures’ live-action adaptation of children’s classic Harold and the Purple Crayon. Rapper Lil Yachty (ICM) will produce and possibly star in Mattel’s feature adaptation of card game Uno. Ben Stiller (WME, 3 Arts, Gang Tyre) will direct Focus Features’ Bag Man, a true-life drama based on a Rachel Maddow podcast. Michelle Rodriguez (CAA, Untitled) and Justice Smith (WME, Kohl, Sloane Offer) have joined Chris…

The COVID-19 relief package passed in December is expected to distribute $15 billion for artistic venues, which includes independent movie theaters. Around the greater L.A. area, some small theaters have closed all operations for the duration of the shutdown that began in March, most notably the Vista, the Downtown Independent and the Quentin Tarantino-owned New Beverly Cinema. Here’s how four others are struggling to stay afloat as the National Association of Theatre Owners estimates that 70 percent of smaller movie theaters are at risk of shuttering without federal aid. ARENA CINELOUNGE To help supplement the income of their Academy Award-qualified drive-in theater — launched in December in the Egyptian Theatre parking lot — the Arena Cinelounge sells gourmet popcorn online, shipped nationally. However, CEO and founder Christian Meoli explains that…

Designing Women Star Designing Masks for Politicos At her weekly news conference the day after Joe Biden’s inauguration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that welcoming a new administration felt like a “breath of fresh air.” She did so wearing a floral-print mask handmade by Designing Women and Young Sheldon actress Annie Potts. With sewing partner Paige Peter, Potts began making masks early in the pandemic after production paused on Young Sheldon (she plays Connie “Meemaw” Tucker on that show). Through one of Peter’s connections, they have been getting masks into the hands of power players like Pelosi, Maxine Waters and Kamala Harris (who has yet to wear hers). The duo also has donated masks to raise money for causes like food-rescue group White Pony Express. “Maybe it was all those…

In an Oscar season in which members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are stuck at home with more time than ever to consume movies, there are fewer movies than ever that they actually want to consume. “The biggest contender this year is Apathy,” one longtime Academy member emailed me last week. “Many I’ve spoken with say they will pass on voting this year.” It’s not just that several of the highest-profile movies that were slated to be in contention were pushed back on the calendar until theaters can widely reopen — among them Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch — or that there are so many great options streaming on TV. It’s that the movies that are in the mix are…

Every year, the Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations shift the awards race into another gear by cementing some early favorites. This year, such films as The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm likely will see a nice boost from their strong showings. The nominations from the HFPA and SAG-AFTRA also almost always produce their fair share of eyebrow-raising choices (this year’s include a Globe nom for Kate Hudson in the under-the-radar film Music and the exclusion of Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods). But it should come as no surprise that in the year of COVID-19, in which most Americans were cloistered in their homes, streaming giant Netflix dominated the Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations in a way it never has before. The prolific company picked…

Anya Taylor-Joy has been so busy filming the latest David O. Russell film in Los Angeles that she wasn’t aware of when the Globe nominations would be announced. So when she woke up Feb. 3 to a flurry of calls and texts, she braced for the worst. “My immediate thought was, ‘Who died?’ ” says the 24-year-old actress. “It was actually wonderful news. It was a lovely surprise — and pretty surreal.” Not only did she earn an acting nomination for Netflix’s breakout limited series The Queen’s Gambit (the streaming service’s most watched limited series ever), but she picked up another nom for Focus’ Emma. The following day, she earned a SAG Award nod for The Queen’s Gambit as well. What would you say these two characters had in common?…

The origin story of Love Story, which celebrates its 50th anniversary with a limited-edition Blu-ray and, on Feb. 12, a double star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal, is a rocky one. Erich Segal’s screenplay about star-crossed lovers garnered little interest until Paramount head of production Robert Evans took a chance on it for the floundering studio, whose parent company Gulf+Western was about to walk after a string of box office flops. At the studio’s request in advance of the film, Segal turned it into a novel, which became a best-seller upon its release on Valentine’s Day 1970. Evans offered the role of well-off Harvard Law student Oliver to Peter Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jeff Bridges, who all turned it down. Then Segal recommended…

Laughter is so important to our communities, but you would never know from the way we’ve been portrayed,” says Seminole Nation filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, one of the voices in comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff’s new book, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem (Simon & Schuster, $27), titled after a reliable punchline by late Oneida Nation comic Charlie Hill about the loss of homelands. THR spoke with Nesteroff about his look at Native Americans in stand-up as well as wider representation. You note in the book that Indigenous leaders met with President Taft in 1911 to ask for help in stopping “grossly libelous” portrayals in silent films. Did their movement see some success? By the ’20s, there were some changes thanks to agitation. Studios, for example, [were] provided with lists of…

Aardman Animations’ irrepressible Shaun made his onscreen debut 26 years ago in the Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit short A Close Shave, and while the little stop-motion sheep had just seven minutes of screen time, his appearance garnered so much attention that he went on to became one of the Bristol, U.K.-based animation studio’s most recognizable characters. After a quarter century, the Chaplin-esque sheep created by the legendary Nick Park is as popular as ever. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, Aardman’s second featurelength movie based on the woolly character — who in this film has a close encounter with an alien — debuted on Netflix in February 2020 and is now vying for an Oscar nomination (its 2019 U.K. release earned a BAFTA nom last year). When the Aardman team…

THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY IS Lee Daniels’ fifth film as a director, his 10th as a producer — and his first without a longstanding crutch. “This is my first film sober,” says Daniels, 61, speaking via Zoom from his home in Beverly Hills in mid-January. Daniels quit using drugs after making his 2009 film, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, which earned six Oscar nominations, including best director and best picture, and he quit drinking four years ago, midway through his hit Fox series, Empire. “You can’t anesthetize,” he says of the impact of his new sobriety. “A glass of vodka is a nice cover, a blanket, a fur coat on you to take away all the insecurities that you have, to take away all of…

Ryan Coogler was finishing Marvel’s historic Black Panther superhero movie when a panther figure of a different kind came into his life. He and his wife, Zinzi, were having dinner in the Brooklyn backyard of filmmaker and friend Shaka King in August 2017 when King mentioned a project he wanted to direct about Fred Hampton, the famed Chicago Black Panther Party leader. In 1969, Hampton was assassinated by law enforcement with the help of petty thief William O’Neal, who became a key FBI informant in J. Edgar Hoover’s plan to destroy the party. “[We] weren’t thinking of producing anything then,” says Coogler. “But it was one of those things I couldn’t ignore. [King] would keep me in the loop, and then around the time Black Panther came out, Zinzi and…

Starz’s miniseries adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries has a doozy of an opening: Various people are running through the dark. Somebody gets shot. Somebody else also seems to get shot, but when she touches her wound, instead of blood there’s gold dust. It’s a confusing scene that some viewers are going to find utterly infuriating. Even as the six episodes unfold, clarity about what exactly happened there is, at best, partial. Catton’s book was very much a commentary on 19th century novelistic storytelling, and in many ways the small-screen version, which Catton adapted herself, is a commentary on Peak TV storytelling — specifically its intentionally disorienting and disruptive devices and conceits. Viewed in this light, The Luminaries makes for occasionally fascinating viewing, though it…

Picture Minari After a lackluster showing at the Golden Globe noms (only a foreign-language mention), it roared back with three SAG Award noms and 10 Critics Choice noms. It also had a Feb. 4 Ramy Youssef-moderated virtual Q&A introduced by California’s new U.S. senator, Alex Padilla. News of the World Apart from noms for 12-year-old Helena Zengel, Paul Greengrass’ latest film was MIA from major categories at the Globe and SAG noms — but bounced back with Critics Choice noms for best picture, actor (Tom Hanks), adapted screenplay and young actor/actress (Zengel). Actress Sophia Loren The Life Ahead The Italian legend has now missed with Globe, SAG and CC noms — though her film, directed by son Edoardo Ponti and appearing on Netflix, received foreign-language Globe and CC noms even…

Wine has famously inspired feature films and docs (Sideways, Somm). Add in entertainment-themed wines (The Walking Dead wine) and clubs (like TCM’s wine club), and even more celeb-backed bottles swirling around right now, and it’s clear that vino and film go hand in hand. But it’s likely that no one has ever released a new wine brand alongside producing a wine-focused film. Enter producer Gene Kirkwood (Rocky), writer-director George Gallo (The Comeback Trail) and Broadway producer Kevin Kinsella (Jersey Boys), who are prepping a canned wine called Chasing Crush alongside a movie of the same name that will shoot this summer. “Most movies with tie-ins are usually like Marvel comics. This is more of an art film with a product tied to it,” says Kirkwood. Chasing Crush, the film, will follow…

Steve McQueen’s BBC and Amazon anthology series Small Axe has been racking up awards — along with some confusion. The series that follows West Indian immigrants in London comprises five short films, varying in length from 64 minutes to 128 minutes. While it earned a Globe nom for best limited series, anthology series or motion picture made for TV, the project also landed the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s award for best picture in December (the winner of this prize almost always goes on to earn Oscar nominations). The LAFCA win sparked a heated debate on social media whether McQueen’s latest work was a film or a TV series. McQueen, though, is ready to settle the debate: “This was always made for television, for the BBC, because I wanted my…

Opening in 1981, HBO Max’s new miniseries It’s a Sin begins with a celebration of the short period of time when young gay men who came of sexual age in the early ’80s were able to enjoy the refuge of London’s hopping queer scene, before AIDS killed many of their friends and lovers. Series writer and creator Russell T. Davies (Years and Years, A Very English Scandal, the original Queer as Folk) accomplishes the quasimiraculous feat of keeping much of his five-part, decade-spanning series (which debuted on the U.K.’s Channel 4 in January) fizzy and effervescent without ever diminishing the devastation of the AIDS crisis. As with Years and Years, Davies seldom slows his galloping pace, the velocity of his scripts giving us as much of his characters’ lives as…

Atrio of female engineers will be among the honorees during the Academy’s virtual Scientific and Technical Awards — particularly fitting given that Kathleen Kennedy will lead a tribute to women who work in the science and technical aspects of filmmaking. The awards, to be handed out Feb. 13 at a virtual ceremony streamed on the Oscars website, will honor 17 technologies representing 55 total individuals. This is a field still largely dominated by men. Since 1961, only 23 SciTech Awards have been given to 20 women, including the Award of Commendation to Mary Ann Anderson (environmentally responsible efforts) and multiple honors for Hildegard Ebbesmeier (cinema projection lenses), Diane E. Kestner (developments in motion picture film) and Jean Messner (color video-assist camera technology). This year, three women — Hayley Iben of…