Innholdsfortegnelse for February 17, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

It’s a plot twist that no studio relishes: One of its high-profile stars sparks outrage with a controversial social media post. On Feb. 10, The Mandalorian’s Gina Carano became the latest member of the Disney fold to do so, joining a list that includes Roseanne Barr, James Gunn, Letitia Wright and Liu Yifei — each drawing varying degrees of action or inaction from the studio. And no studio faces greater scrutiny over its decisions than the family-friendly Hollywood giant. In Carano’s case, the move to cut ties had been brewing for some time. In the months leading up to Disney’s investor day presentation Dec. 10, Carano’s agents at UTA were negotiating for the actress to receive a sizable bump for a planned spinoff of Disney+’s The Mandalorian that was to…

The collective Meow Wolf — creator of Santa Fe’s immersive art experience House of Eternal Return (which counts George R.R. Martin as a creative contributor and financial backer) — is readying its first expansion. On Feb. 18, it debuts Omega Mart inside Las Vegas’ retail and entertainment complex Area 15. With more than 325 artistic contributors (including Brian Eno and Santigold), Omega Mart invites visitors inside a grocery store stocked with surrealist products, then on to a maze of spaces filled with sound and digital content and multidimensional art. Creative director Corvas Brinkerhoff says Omega Mart is projected to see some 1 million visitors a year post-pandemic — as of now, attendance will be limited in accordance with state guidelines.…

Engagements For All Mankind’s Joel Kinnaman announced his engagement to model Kelly Gale via Instagram on Jan. 18. Births Lauren Peteroy Kelly, senior account director at Scenario PR, and husband James Kelly welcomed daughter Mackenzie Ruth Kelly on Aug. 24 on Long Island in New York. Congrats Amazon promoted drama head Marc Resteghini to U.S and global head of development and hired Laura Lancaster as head of series on Feb. 10. Danny Barton joined UTA as a sports content executive Feb. 10. CAA Sports hired Samira Zebian and promoted Rob DeAngelis and Rob Slocum to global co-heads of property sales Feb. 15. CAA upped Bryant Barile, Albert Lee and Stephanie Smalling to agents in its motion picture literary department Feb. 10. Travis Merriweather was upped to senior political strategist at…

Teen movies just stopped being made and it sucked,” says Matt Kaplan, the 36-year-old producer behind Netflix’s ultra-popular To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before film series. “Having worked at Lionsgate and other film studios, they for the most part were franchise-building, and they weren’t focused on this type of film.” The irony is that Kaplan, through his company ACE Entertainment, has turned that type of film into a franchise. Kaplan had offers from four studios for the first To All the Boys film. But the producer, who at the time was running the film division of media company Awesomeness, had just released another teen film, Before I Fall, theatrically and was underwhelmed by its performance. Instead, he took the film to Netflix. It’s an obvious choice now, but in…

During the golden age of Westerns, film crews would often make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to the Morongo Basin in San Bernardino County to shoot in the pristine, rugged desert. In 1946, actor Dick Curtis decided to monetize the location and banded with movie cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers to create a wild West film location and settlement that they named Pioneertown. The real cowboys already living in the area (north of what is now Joshua Tree National Park) weren’t too pleased. “Back when Pioneertown Corporation was hauling in potential land buyers and weekend tourists from Los Angeles, they set up a little ambush just as the buses got into town. A gang of armed men would ride up along the bus and force it to pull over,” says Pioneertown…

1985 227 King’s Hollywood career began as a teen, when she landed a starring role as Marla Gibbs’ daughter, Brenda, on the hit 1980s sitcom 227 (right), which aired for five seasons on NBC. 1991 Boyz n the Hood Eager to break out of the sitcom mold, King scored a role in John Singleton’s 1991 drama Boyz n the Hood. “I knew I was so much more than Brenda, and I just needed an opportunity to show it,” King has said. 1996 Jerry Maguire At 25, she played Cuba Gooding Jr.’s shrewd, supportive, tough-talking wife in the 1996 hit Jerry Maguire. “I saw that this was the time to be looked at as a woman, not as this girl,” King has since said. 2009 Southland King played a detective on…

Celebrated for his 2000 film The Great Dance, South African documentary filmmaker Craig Foster found himself, a decade later, exhausted from the pressures of trying to survive as a documentarian. Feeling a sense of detachment from the outside world as well as the people closest to him, Foster attempted to rekindle his passion for life by free-diving in the freezing temps of the Atlantic, vowing to do so every day for a year. It was there, in the kelp forest outside his home on the Western Cape, that he encountered an octopus that would help him reconnect with life, both above and below the surface. Foster and his friendship with a cephalopod are the subject of Netflix’s first South African nature documentary, directed by first-time South African filmmaker Pippa Ehrlich…

Two of Us FRANCE For years, when I was going around trying to get the film financed,” says Filippo Meneghetti, about his French Oscar entry Two of Us, “I would tell people: ‘This is a melodrama, but I’m going to shoot it like a thriller.’ That was always my plan.” The story of Two of Us — which follows a pair of elderly women who have been secret lovers for decades, only to be pulled apart when one of them suffers a debilitating stroke — could have been milked for pathos. Instead, Meneghetti’s tale of “exclusion and self-censorship” unfolds like a Hitchcock film. “I didn’t want to push any kind of overt emotion on the audience,” Meneghetti says. “The thriller gives you the possibility of having your audience be more…

Director Regina King One Night In Miami The supporting actress Oscar winner for 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk once again proved her versatility — and got in a plug for her theatrical directing debut — when she hosted the Feb. 13 edition of Saturday Night Live to upbeat reviews. Original Song “Io Si (Seen),” The Life Ahead “Free,” The One and Only Ivan The list of song finalists includes these two tunes that were written or co-written by Oscar ceremony regular Diane Warren. She is angling to be a nominee for the sixth time in seven years and 12th time overall (but has yet to win). Documentary Feature International Feature Collective, The Mole Agent The first, a Romanian doc about that country’s health care industry, and the second, a…

Abracadabra! Virtual Formats Lead to Booming Magic Shows Magicians and mentalists are having a moment during the pandemic. Among the hot shows are virtual offerings from Justin Willman (known for Netflix’s Magic for Humans), Jason Suran (whose Zoom readings have been praised by Alan Cumming) and Helder Guimarães (whose show The Future is presented by the Geffen Playhouse). Dan White’s consistently sold-out Zoom show The Magician (tickets are $129), though, likely holds the honor of having most star-studded audience of late, with attendees including Hillary Clinton, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, Sacha Baron Cohen and Gwyneth Paltrow. “Magic is inherently social and unexpectedly physical. So, the challenge here was preserving that feeling and creating that social experience,” says White of performing on Zoom. “A lot of those audience members are heroes…

The directors branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been put on notice. One of the most notorious set of Oscar stats is the fact that during the whole of its 92-year history, the Academy has nominated only five women for best director. There has never been more than one woman nominated in a given year. And only one — Kathryn Bigelow for 2009’s The Hurt Locker — has ever won. But this year there are more viable female candidates than ever knocking on the door. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Critics Choice Awards have both nominated three of them: Chloé Zhao for Nomadland, her portrait of a wandering woman seeking liberation on the road; Regina King, for One Night in Miami, her account…

VFX Welcome to Chechnya is the first documentary to ever make the VFX shortlist. And Soul is the rare animated film to be listed in the category. Only three animated films (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Kubo and the Two Strings and 2019’s The Lion King) have ever been nominated in the category. Song/Score Several artists find themselves on the shortlists more than once: Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor for the scores for Mank and Soul; John Legend for original songs “Never Break” from Giving Voice and “Make It Work” from Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey; Harry Gregson-Williams for Mulan’s score and original song “Loyal Brave True”; Daniel Pemberton for scoring The Trial of the Chicago 7 and co-writing its song “Hear My Voice”; and Dianne Warren (who has been nominated…

For the past decade, filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering have been on a righteous crusade, casting light on institutional failures to confront sexual abuse and giving a platform to survivors. They’ve exposed rot in the military (The Invisible War), on college campuses (The Hunting Ground) and in the music industry (2020’s On the Record). Each documentary has concluded with a list of the accused and implicated who declined to be interviewed — unsurprisingly, as one can hardly imagine how it would behoove an alleged predator to appear in these movies. Dick and Ziering are filmmaker-advocates who may have begun their journey screaming into the void, but a cacophony has since risen up to join them. In that light, it’s easy to see why the Woody Allen/Mia Farrow saga would…

The United States was founded in 1776, but the modern America we live in today, argues Netflix’s six-part docuseries Amend, was born in 1868, with the ratification of the 14th Amendment in the wake of the Civil War. Intended to grant citizenship to the formerly enslaved, the 14th, by promising all citizens “equal protection of the laws,” has offered an obstacle-choked path toward equality for Black Americans and other groups of color, women and LGBTQ people. According to host Will Smith, the amendment is “the center of the promise of America.” Yes, Netflix’s maximalist programming ethos has led to one of the biggest movie stars in the world anchoring a sixhour elaboration on a single constitutional amendment. Amend’s blinding star wattage is furthered by the likes of Mahershala Ali, Samuel…

What do Shakira, Michael Bublé, Metallica and Neil Young have in common? Some or all of their hits have recently become part of the growing portfolio of Hipgnosis Songs Fund. The Notting Hill, London-based company was founded in 2018 by Merck Mercuriadis, a well-connected former music manager for the likes of Elton John, Beyoncé and Guns N’ Roses. Artists selling catalogs have been a theme of the pandemic, and Hipgnosis started 2021 with a flurry of acquisition news, including deals with Bublé, Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and magnate Jimmy Iovine. Financial terms of individual deals are typically not revealed, but in all, Hipgnosis has spent a whopping $1.75 billion on 129 catalogs, accumulating 60,836 songs. Among them are modern hits, such as Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and Rihanna’s “Umbrella,”…

After Rihanna tweeted “why aren’t we talking about this?!” on Feb. 2 about ongoing farmers’ protests in India, other Hollywood names are putting a spotlight on the struggle. Since November, nearly a million farmers have gathered on the outskirts of New Delhi to protest government reforms they say will damage their industry and drive down prices. The government has deployed tear gas, internet shutdowns and paramilitary forces against the protesters. Others bringing attention to the issue include Padma Lakshmi, Trevor Noah and Mindy Kaling. In response, India’s Ministry of External Affairs blasted “celebrities and others” for their “neither accurate nor responsible” comments. Mehdi Hasan, host of Peacock’s The Mehdi Hasan Show, says Bollywood stars have remained mostly quiet because they’ve “lined up behind Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi, most likely due to…

During Black History Month, Instagram has been highlighting and promoting shortform content as part of its yearslong #ShareBlackStories initiative. The platform is now taking it a step further by enlisting Queen & Slim filmmaker Melina Matsoukas and talent from Howard University for a new program called the Instagram x Share Black Stories “Future First” Reels Challenge. Students from the school’s Department of Media, Journalism and Film will create visual ideas of Black excellence, and five, selected by Matsoukas, will receive $10,000 to support costs associated with mounting their work. The students will be mentored by Matsoukas and Howard advisers and educators. Furthermore, the storytellers will have their content earmarked for sharing across the Instagram platform. “Having the ability to create in these spaces and have hundreds of thousands, or millions…

Setting up shop at NBCUniversal after more than a decade at 20th Century Fox, where she created ABC’s series Fresh Off the Boat and Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23, Nahnatchka Khan is kicking off her next era with a somewhat surprising passion project: a sitcom based on the childhood of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. But it’s a surprise only if you don’t know Khan — “Natch” to her friends and colleagues. The 47-year-old writer did not grow up in a Hollywood home — she was born in Las Vegas and raised in Hawaii — but she and her brother Nick, who decamped from CAA in 2020 to serve as president of WWE, sought out industry careers after being reared with a love of film, TV and, particularly, professional…

Describing his first pairing with director Shaka King, cinematographer Sean Bobbitt says the helmer wanted to bring a reality to Judas and the Black Messiah, the ’60s-set film in which William O’Neal (played by LaKeith Stanfield) becomes an FBI informant and betrays Fred Hampton (portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya), leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. “It’s not a documentary. He was looking for a reality, a recreation of that period, and a very intimate approach to the characters,” the director of photography says of the Warner Bros. drama, which, after its Sundance premiere earlier this month, is now available on HBO Max. King compiled hundreds of still photographs from the period, which informed the film’s look. In their research, King and Bobbitt also watched such documentaries as…

REGINA KING IN CONVERSATION WITH GINA PRINCE-BY THE WOOD There was no pre-Zoom huddle about wardrobe, yet fellow filmmakers Regina King and Gina Prince-Bythewood both pipe in virtually on an early February afternoon, sporting sweatshirts embossed with phrases appropriate to the conversation they would have. Prince-Bythewood’s reads: “A credit to my people.” King’s: “Ambition.” “We’ve got to remind ourselves,” says Prince-Bythewood, fromher home in Los Angeles. “Exactly,” offers the One Night inMiami director, also in L.A., before borrowing a line from renowned writer James Baldwin: “Our crown has already been bought and paid for, all we have to do is wear it.” Prince-Bythewood, 51, has ostensibly signed on to interviewKing, 50, an Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress turned first-time feature director with the Amazon Studios drama, but it very quickly becomes…

People are talking about H.E.R., who recently rocked Super Bowl LV with a soulful rendition of “America the Beautiful” (with a guitar solo that would have made Prince smile) and whose groovy throwback “Fight for You” can be heard in Warner Bros.’ Judas and the Black Messiah, about the 1969 police assassination of Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton. The 23-year-old Grammy-nominated virtuoso with the acronym for a name — it’s pronounced “her” and stands for Having Everything Revealed — spoke to THR from her Miami recording studio about her goals of achieving representation and revolution through music. Congratulations on your Super Bowl performance. It was a highlight of the game. Thank you so much. It was the highlight of my career as of now, because it was so much fun.…

n the day of the 2018 Indie Spirit Awards, Frances McDormand, Peter Spears and Chloé Zhao converged at McDormand’s Los Angeles apartment to discuss collaborating on a film. McDormand and producer Spears had recently optioned Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland, a nonfiction ode to baby boomers forced to live in campers as a result of economic hardships, and Zhao was their first choice to direct. Later that day, McDormand would win a best actress Spirit Award for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, while Spears’ Call Me by Your Name was facing off against Zhao’s The Rider for best picture. But on that cool March morning, there wasn’t a hint of competitiveness. “She was wearing overalls,” Zhao recalls of her first impressions of McDormand, 63. “She’s very fashionable and she made that…

At 75, Dolly Parton has all but achieved sainthood. Beyond her immeasurable contributions to the American music canon, she has donated well over 100 million books to children worldwide through her Imagination Library program and provided $1 million in seed money that led to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. But 40 years ago, the country music icon was having her first taste of crossover success — in both movies and the pop charts. The project was 9 to 5, a comedy whose premise came from Jane Fonda, who’d worked with a real organization called 9to5 that sought to improve conditions for women office workers. Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Parton — in her first film role — filled out the cast as a trio of secretaries who plotted revenge on their chauvinist boss…