Innholdsfortegnelse for August 25, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

Going out with a bang, so to speak, the final season of The Walking Dead brings the Commonwealth (a community of survivors) from the comics to the screen. The introduction of this utopian-seeming community offers the opportunity for a fashion infusion into the zombie apocalypse series, which returned Aug. 22. Joining the AMC show toward the end of season 10, costume designer Vera Chow eagerly took on the challenge of expanding the wardrobe scope of the entire series beyond the established utilitarian and tactical survival essentials. And while she can’t say much about the looks she chose for members of the Commonwealth, one hint is the use of brands like vibrant knitwear maker YanYan, known for its cozy and charming cardigans. Chow also changed up the sourcing process by…

Monica Lewinsky apologizes in advance for the number of times she will inevitably employ the term “weird” or “surreal” in the roughly two hours we have together over Zoom. It’s just that she can’t seem to find a more apt pair of descriptors for the experience of revisiting her very complicated, very public past with an actress — in this case, Beanie Feldstein, who’s also present — portraying a younger version of herself. Monica, your fellow producers have described the process of making this show together as “really, really complicated.” Is that a fair characterization? MONICA LEWINSKY Very. For me, it was challenging to come to the script process and the dramaturgical process not only having had my own experiences but particularly because I did testify so many times and…

Official Competition STARS Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz DIRECTORS Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat SALES Protagonist Pictures THE BUZZ This Spanish-language comedy imagines Cruz and Banderas as a world-famous director and a Hollywood star, respectively, who are brought together by a billionaire businessman to make his vanity project. The appeal of Spain’s two biggest stars together onscreen for an entire film (their only joint screen time to date was the blink-and-you-miss-it opening shot in Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited) should bring buyers running. Promises STAR Isabelle Huppert DIRECTOR Thomas Kruithof SALES Elle Driver THE BUZZ Huppert stars as a fearless and ambitious mayor of a town outside Paris in this French political drama. The actress’ devoted global fan base ensures that international art house distributors will give it a long look. Amira…

There are two identity crises at the heart of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. One is written into the narrative: Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) is the son of an immortal crime lord (Tony Leung) who has rejected his father’s empire for a simpler and less murderous life parking cars for a ritzy San Francisco hotel. His journey will involve making himself whole again, reconciling his dark past with his good heart to forge a new way forward. The other identity crisis lies with the film itself. Shang-Chi, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, attempts to shake up the Marvel formula by infusing it with martial arts action and fairytale fantasy and grounding it in Chinese and Asian American culture. And while its disparate elements don’t meld together as smoothly…

Filmed 10 years before the catastrophic events of 9/11, when firefighters were heralded as national heroes, and decades before wildfires became a year-round phenomenon as a result of climate change, the 1991 movie Backdraft was a veritable recruitment poster for a profession already viewed as selflessly noble. Critics were unanimous in their praise of its special effects but less impressed by the film’s crisscross storylines involving sibling rivalry, a collapsed marriage and a pyromaniacal murderer. Moviegoers liked it, though — so much so that the Universal/Imagine feature broke a record for a Memorial Day weekend premiere and grossed $77.9 million total domestically ($156 million today). To commemorate its 30th anniversary, Backdraft will be rereleased for two days (Sept. 5 and Sept. 8) by Fathom Events in approximately 600 theaters nationwide.…

With ballots already mailed to voters in California deciding whether to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom in a Sept. 14 recall election, the embattled governor is pulling out all the stops, leaning on supporters in the entertainment industry to help raise money and rally followers to reject the recall effort. Since he was elected governor in 2018, Newsom — a San Francisco native — has made concerted efforts to spend more time in Southern California and make inroads with the powerful political constituencies in and around Los Angeles that obviously include the entertainment industry (it’s no coincidence that he held his 2018 election night party in downtown L.A. and delivered his annual State of the State address at Dodger Stadium in March). Now, he’s hoping that the local networking will…

During the past year and a half, multiple studios stared down a now-familiar scenario: delaying the release of a tentpole movie and pulling the plug on a marketing campaign, only to try to figure out how to reposition the title many months later. Marketing execs face an uphill climb — not to mention a budget crunch — when this happens, and many projects haven’t quite achieved liftoff at the box office when they finally unspool. But Disney’s Free Guy, which has grossed more than $111 million globally since its Aug. 13 stateside launch, offers a surprising case study in how to sell a film that’s been delayed multiple times because of the pandemic. Star Ryan Reynolds worked closely with Disney marketing chief Asad Ayaz, who led the varied campaign for…

Ever since Cobra Kai premiered in 2018, I have heard some version of the following: “I can’t believe how much I loved your show, because whenever Hollywood attempts to bring back a classic movie franchise, it almost never works out.” Well, my co-creators Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and I completely understand where that sentiment comes from. Having grown up in the 1980s, we are the target audience for many of the repackaged/revamped/rebooted movie franchises we grew up with. We know what it’s like to get lured in by nostalgia, only to feel let down by a cash-grab that takes advantage of our childhood memories. But that didn’t stop us from bringing back one of our favorite movie franchises — The Karate Kid. And now that its follow-up Cobra Kai has…

As the delta variant spurs a spike in COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles — along with vaccine mandate rollouts and indoor mask rules being restored — children across the city are returning to in-person school, eliciting emotions ranging from delight to dread from parents. LAUSD public schools welcomed students back to the classroom Aug. 16, while charter and private schools’ first days are staggered now through after Labor Day — a month span in which hundreds of thousands of preschoolers and elementary and middle schoolers, not yet old enough to hit the 12-year-old vaccine age minimum, will be back in close quarters. “I have quite a bit of anxiety around the transmissibility of delta,” says one industry mother whose 5-year-old son is starting kindergarten at Citizens of the World East…

Weddings Maggie Burkhead, vp development and production at Endeavor Content, married Brett Pirtle, head of development at Fee-Fi-Fo Films, on July 24 at Higuera Ranch in San Luis Obispo, California. Engagements Modern Family’s Eric Stonestreet announced his engagement to pediatric nurse Lindsay Schweitzer via Instagram on Aug. 22. Births Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost announced the arrival of son Cosmo on Aug. 18. Get Out and BlacKkKlansman producer Shaun Redick and his wife, producer Yvette Yates, welcomed Paxton Charles Redick on June 11 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Congrats Sergio Ezama was hired as chief talent officer of Netflix on Aug. 20. NFL Network veteran Mike Muriano was named executive producer of live sports at Amazon Prime Video on Aug. 17. Joe Januszewski was tapped as senior vp and…

When Scarlett Johansson sued Disney on July 29 over her Black Widow pay, one community in Hollywood took the development especially personally: the ranks of transactional attorneys who negotiate deals for top talent. For many of them, the suit over the film’s concurrent release in theaters and on Disney+ not only highlights the complexity of compensation in the streaming era, it’s also evidence of massive disruption to relationships. “All of a sudden, [the studios are] acting like tech companies,” says Matt Galsor, a Greenberg Glusker partner who reps Chris Hemsworth, Tom Cruise, and Anthony and Joe Russo. Adds Leigh Brecheen, who reps Conan O’Brien and John Oliver at Brecheen Feldman, “The Hollywood I grew up in, people had an understanding that terms were generally understood and you’d be dealing with…

On Comedy Central’s Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens, loving, foul-mouthed Grandma (Lori Tan Chinn) ups her delightfully audacious style on season two, which premiered Aug. 18, thanks to the joint effort of costume designer Staci Greenbaum and the actress. “Lori and I talk about what we want Grandma to maybe be saying. Oftentimes, it’s subversive,” says Greenbaum, who also outfits Chinn in “highly collectible” Air Jordans and finery that references style icon Iris Apfel. Continuing a streak of bold statements from last season — like “Asians Don’t Raisin” — Chinn brought in about 20 of her own tops (often in sturdy, supportive black fabrics to avoid constrictive bras) for Greenbaum to select from. In a “Harvard” T-shirt modified to “HARD,” Grandma rudely awakens Nora (Awkwafina) in the premiere. Later, she…

For the entirety of production, Feldstein — who used wigs and shapewear but no prosthetics — carried around Lewinsky’s authorized late 1990s biography in her backpack: “It’s as close as I had to Monica at that time,” she says. Lewinsky also shared with her the music that she had listened to in that era, so the actress made a “Monica playlist,” which included Carly Simon and Helen Reddy covers of theater songs, to listen to on set. Landing their Clinton took longer than the producers expected, but they didn’t want a Saturday Night Live impersonation of him. Owen, they collectively felt, had the chops, the physicality and charisma that they were after. Once Owen was in, he says, “I asked what real archive footage they expected to be in the…

On the opening night of the 2020 Venice Film Festival, the heads of seven European film festivals — including Cannes boss Thierry Frémaux, Berlin artistic director Carlo Chatrian, José Luis Rebordinos of San Sebastian and Tricia Tuttle of the London Film Festival — joined Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera onstage at the Sala Grande. It was a sign of solidarity with Venice as the first major international festival to hold an in-person event since the start of COVID-19. A year on, Venice remains the gold standard for how to hold a film festival during a pandemic. The safety measures piloted on the Lido — temperature checks upon entry; masks and social distancing in theaters; online ticketing for every screening, event and news conference — have become the norm for international…

Source: California Secretary of State’s office…

Not too long ago, before the pandemic, some real estate investors may have shunned studio lots over fears they would be left with idle or underused shooting stages. Now, as Wall Street cools on office towers, hotels and shopping malls amid remote work, online shopping and COVID-19, major private equity money is flowing to operators of studio lots in North American cities. “We’re the new asset class for large financial institutions,” says Chris Cooney, CEO of EUE/Screen Gems Studios, which runs an 11-stage Atlanta complex where Netflix’s Stranger Things season four shot in 2020. To meet a growing subscriber demand for streaming film and TV content, top studio markets in Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, Atlanta and New York now see developers investing to own campus-size facilities. (And longtime owners are…

At the beginning of the pandemic, the appeal of residential towers plummeted as people sought extra personal space. Cut to summer 2021, and condo sales are on the rise in L.A., led by the recent sale of a 2,681-square-foot unit at the new Pendry Residences West Hollywood for $13 million. At $4,848 a square foot, that’s a new record for condos in the Southland. The Pendry Residences are far from a typical tower. Each of the 40 units has its own dedicated elevator access, and many of the two- and three-bedroom condos have mondo-sized outdoor space (up to 3,460 square feet) and even their own swimming pools. Says Steven Ehrlich of Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chainey Architects of the prodigious use of terraces: “It’s like floating in the air with your…

For more than 100 years, South Los Angeles has been home to a largely Black and brown population, rooted in a history of redlining and segregation that kept nonwhite residents below Washington Boulevard. Los Angeles is “terribly bifurcated by race,” says entrepreneur Prophet Walker, a native of South L.A. “And that’s all a remnant of redlining.” These days though, the area looks a little different. As native Tiffany Haddish says, “It’s gotten very white.” With a 2017 city report finding a 25.4 percent white population, compared to 27.9 percent Black (in stark contrast to the 80 percent Black population of the 1970s, which has also been affected by a large Latino influx, accounting for 61 percent of South L.A.’s 2017 population), she’s right. The area is also changing in…

Ed Asner is 91 but still as crotchety and lovable as he was playing Lou Grant — described by The New York Times as “one of the most endearing characters on television” — on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) and Lou Grant (1977-82) a half-century ago. (He also popped up as the character on Rhoda and Roseanne.) A seven-time Emmy winner, he is one of only two performers to have won drama and comedy prizes for the same part (Uzo Aduba is the other) and one of just three to have received Emmys for dramatic, comedic and limited series (the others are Aduba and Cloris Leachman). Ahead of the second pandemic-era Emmys, the former two-term president of SAG (1981-85) and 1996 inductee into the TV Academy Hall of Fame…

It was while working together on 2018’s The Kindergarten Teacher, her first feature effort as producer, that Maggie Gyllenhaal floated to her Pie Films producing partners Osnat Handelsman-Keren and Talia Kleinhendler her desire to direct. She zeroed in on Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novella The Lost Daughter, a story about a literature professor from the U.K. on a summer holiday who, after befriending a young mother, grapples with the fraught parenting of her own daughters and the guilt-ridden realization that she feels liberated now that they’re adults. The book, which oscillates between a meditation on motherhood and psychological horror, was going to be adapted by Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo before he relinquished the film rights to Ferrante’s Italian publisher six months later. (Costanzo would later direct the HBO series adaptation of…

Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building feels a bit like if you asked Paul Rudnick to adapt one of Paul Auster’s novels of mysterious existential alienation, replacing some, but not all, of its richer undercurrents with pop-culture-savvy quips. The pieces don’t completely mesh. But with a cast this special and an effective enough whodunit to keep viewers charging ahead from one episode to the next, it’s a quibble, not a condemnation, to lament the prioritizing of flailing comedy over opportunities for depth. Created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, the 10-episode Only Murders has the privileged, erudite preciousness of a New Yorker piece. It’s all set in and around the Arconia, a West Side apartment building exclusive enough to house Sting, but perhaps a few years past its peak. That…