Innholdsfortegnelse for September 22, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

On Sept. 18, as industry power brokers were getting ready for the Primetime Emmy Awards telecast, an estimated 2,800 crafts workers in Local 700 — which represents Hollywood editors — participated in a roughly four-hour remote call to discuss options if their umbrella union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, were to call on tens of thousands of its 150,000 members to strike. At least one other local held a similar call over the awards weekend. IATSE, which represents crewmembers including grips, cinematographers, editors, costumers, hairstylists and more, informed members Sept. 20 that it would hold a nationwide strike authorization vote (no date was disclosed) amid increasingly strained contract negotiations with producers. Thirteen West Coast locals have been negotiating their next three-year film and television contract with the Alliance…

Team Ted Lasso Parties On, Breaking Out the Karaoke Apple TV+ and its Ted Lasso team were in a celebratory mood after the Emmys, as to be expected. But in lieu of an oversized bash, their afterparty was a strictly “friends and family” gathering for the cast and creative team. It all went down on the terrace at Sunset Tower’s Tower Bar, conveniently chosen since many of the partygoers already were staying at the property for Emmy weekend. Jason Sudeikis, still in his teal velvet Tom Ford tuxedo, was surprised when he was presented with a birthday cake and the entire room belted out “Happy Birthday” (he turned 46 on Emmy eve). He also did his fair share of singing, teaming with writer and performer Ashley Nicole Black for a…

Psst. Have you heard how Hollywood studios are in cahoots with a company that secretly owns 4chan? And they’re helping prop up a website that surreptitiously traffics in sexually explicit figurines of underage female characters? If not, it may only be a matter of time before this wild tale travels far thanks to an eye-opening court document filed in L.A. earlier in September. The filing comes amid, of all things, a dispute involving Netflix’s Stranger Things. Japan-based Good Smile is the main player here. The company, which grew out of the anime world, manufactures pop culture toys and has big contracts with Marvel, DC Comics, Nintendo, Disney and Netflix for licensed products (such as Batman, Sonic the Hedgehog and Winnie the Pooh figures) that are are sold in Target, Walmart…

OSCAR STATUETTES In a circular room inside the Saban Building’s gold mosaic-tiled cylinder, there are Oscars on loan from the likes of Sidney Poitier and Barry Jenkins — plus an empty case with Hattie McDaniel’s name on a plaque. Contrary to popular view, McDaniel’s lack of a statuette is due to its having gone missing (its own mystery to unravel) and not because she wasn’t given one, despite the acknowledged racism surrounding the actress’ 1939 best supporting actress win for Gone With the Wind: McDaniel was the first African American to win an Oscar but forced to sit at a segregated table at the ceremony in L.A. E.T. Costumes from E.T. and movies like Black Panther comprise the “Story of Cinema” exhibit to showcase the artistry of sci-fi, fantasy and…

CineEurope Oct. 4-7 Barcelona International Convention Centre After a year in which it was postponed and then canceled altogether due to the pandemic, the physical edition of the CineEurope trade show in Spain is back. Among the execs who will be hitting the halls of the Barcelona International Convention Centre in early October is Phil Clapp, a hugely respected figure who sits as head of the U.K. Cinema Association and president of Europe’s International Union of Cinemas. It’s been an almost indescribably tough 18 months for the exhibition world, but in discussing the U.K. experience since theaters reopened, Clapp offers a very welcome voice of hope. Not only did the crisis not lead to the existential threat so many were first fearing, he tells THR, but admissions are creeping back…

Digital Crypto Spends Big Trading firms enlist stars to gain respectability p. 20 Finance Mnuchin Returns The ex-Trump official is back investing in content p. 22 Lesli Linka Glatter The Homeland helmer wins the election for a two-year term as DGA president and will lead the talks for the union’s next negotiation with studios on a work agreement. Jack Dorsey Twitter, headed by the tech mogul, spends $809.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit from 2016 over allegedly misleading growth metrics. Lucian Grainge Universal Music Group, led by the CEO, goes public in Amsterdam, giving the label a market cap of $53.35 billion at the end of its first trading day, above recent stake valuations. Lior Raz The Fauda co-creator’s Hit & Run thriller series, his first Netflix project and…

Ry Russo-Young’s three-part HBO documentary Nuclear Family was something she “resisted the idea of making” for a while because she “didn’t want to make a me-and-my-problems documentary.” But once the director of such features as The Sun Is Also a Star and Before I Fall decided to tackle it, it was a time of “total truth,” she says. The documentary, out Sept. 26, follows Russo-Young’s mothers, Robin Young and Sandy Russo, who fought a long, emotionally fraught custody battle beginning in 1991 with sperm donor Tom Steel, a then-prominent gay lawyer. It ultimately would engulf her childhood. Returning to that time when the director says she was “loved too much” involved digging up old footage from her youth — which she had far more of than she thought — and…

Weddings Chloe Kivestu, a vp at marketing and PR firm Ketchum, married Mark McGrath, a TV agent at WME, on Aug. 7 at the York Beach Golf & Tennis Club in York, Maine. Births Rebecca Rolnick Knaack, vp at Metro Public Relations, and Jesse Knaack, vp at advertising agency Five by Five, welcomed son Cameron Jude Knaack on Aug. 22 at St. John’s hospital in Santa Monica. Congrats Lesli Linka Glatter was elected DGA president Sept. 18. Aly Parker was appointed president of documentaries at the Kennedy/Marshall Co. on Sept. 17. Victoria Alonso was upped to president of physical and postproduction, visual effects and animation production at Marvel Studios on Sept. 20. Alexandre Parizeau was tapped to head Amazon Games’ development studio Sept. 15. Nina Gregory joined Clubhouse as head…

Bowen Yang was excited that Tiffany & Co. had lent him jewels — “A Tiffany brooch! This is crazy!” he exclaimed on the red carpet — while Michaela Coel seemed deeply moved that designer Christopher John Rogers had spontaneously sketched her custom two-piece dress. After 2020’s largely virtual ceremony, the TV industry seemed eager to embrace finery and celebrate at the 73rd annual Emmy Awards, held Sept. 19 at L.A. Live. Men opted for luxe formal looks (including Jason Sudeikis in a teal velvet Tom Ford tux), while on the women’s side, brilliant colors topped the trends.…

Minstrel,” reads the label on the canister of pancake makeup. The provocative object sits in a glass case next to another tin marked “Chinese,” in the costume, hair and makeup section of the new Academy Museum. Curators placed the 80-year-old jars — used so white actors could play characters of color, often in glaringly stereotypical ways — in the gallery alongside film history pieces with far breezier legacies, like the comfy beige bathrobe Jeff Bridges wore in The Big Lebowski. “Those histories are combined,” says Jacqueline Stewart, the Chicago film scholar and TCM host who is the museum’s chief artistic and programming officer. “We talk about what it means when [blackface and yellowface] is a prevalent industry practice, and we do that in dialogue with pointing out all of the…

After Academy Museum visitors have seen the Hayao Miyazaki exhibition, it’s only natural that they’ll want to enter the worlds the Japanese animator has created onscreen. And the museum’s new film program will oblige, with screenings of Miyazaki’s complete body of work running Oct. 5 to Nov. 27, both in English and in Japanese with subtitles. The series is part of the inaugural season of film screenings, which will unfold at the museum’s two theaters, the 1,000-seat David Geffen — which can show nitrate, 35mm, 70mm and Dolby Vision laser projection and accommodate a 50-piece orchestra — and the more intimate, 288-seat Ted Mann. “We were looking at ways to engage the content in our galleries as launching-off points,” says senior director of film programs Bernardo Rondeau, of the thinking…

Even when he isn’t adapting Stephen King, writer-director Mike Flanagan has carved out a successful niche around stories that feel like they could have been adapted from Stephen King. Most good horror comes from a place of allegory, where the thing that scares us might look like a killer clown or a ghost or a magic-wielding traveler with a funny hat, but it’s really addiction or grief or anything repressed. Like King, Flanagan has a gift for sometimes pushing that subtext far past the surface. A genre fan might at first be disappointed — “But wait, I was promised telekinetic murderous hamster-people, and you’re giving me a 45-minute AA meeting” — only to have the snot scared out of them when the telekinetic murderous hamster-person devours our hero’s sponsor. Flanagan’s…

The Motion Picture Television Fund, which celebrates its centennial Sept. 22, was conceived of by silent film star Mary Pickford. Unlike many of the hedonists populating Hollywood 100 years ago, Pickford and then-husband Douglas Fairbanks — who together with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith co-founded United Artists — liked to set a good example: Prohibition-era soirees at their Pickfair estate in Beverly Hills served Ovaltine, not gin, and the couple often hosted philanthropic events for everything from war veterans to museums. In 1921, the film industry was undergoing a seismic upheaval with the arrival of talkies. Those from the silent era who could not adapt — hundreds of actors, directors and writers — suddenly found themselves unemployed. A concerned Pickford, then 29, set out gathering funds for them in collection…

Shari Redstone’s ViacomCBS appears ready to take a big risk: playing to win in the streaming wars. The company plans to double its streaming content spend to bulk up streamer Paramount+ — it currently spends $15 billion annually, split between linear and digital — and is hunting for partnerships. After merging CBS and Viacom, shedding noncore assets like publisher Simon & Schuster and redeploying freed-up money toward streaming, some on Wall Street are becoming less skeptical of Redstone’s plans. Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall raised his stock rating on ViacomCBS to “overweight” in mid-August, saying, “Streaming efforts are bearing fruit and have impressed us, so we move from historical bears to constructive bulls.” “Historically, we have been bears and saw streaming as a show-me story,” Cahall admitted. “They’ve shown us!”…

Deal of the Week Former Trump administration Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is planning a return to media investing, though expect an emphasis more on digital content than the traditional theatrical films he financed before his turn in government. Mnuchin has raised $2.5 billion for his private equity fund, Liberty Strategic Capital, and is seeking investments in technology, fintech, cybersecurity, financial services and “new forms of content,” according to a news release that accompanied its first investment, in which it led a $275million raise by the cybersecurity firm Cybereason. It isn’t entirely clear what Liberty means by “new forms of content,” but many big tech companies are pushing virtual and augmented reality hardware and content products and digital gaming; both classic video games and content around sports wagering remain hot markets.…

Since pivoting from reality TV producer to corporate suit, Cris Abrego has collected studios and job titles like a snowball. Currently the chairman of the Americas for French media behemoth Banijay and president and CEO of Endemol Shine Holdings, the 48-year-old oversees one of the largest portfolios of unscripted content — with shows such as Fox’s MasterChef and shingles including Truly Original (Bravo’s Real Housewives of Atlanta) — and roughly 1,000 employees and production staffers. It’s an especially impressive plate considering the Los Angeles County native, one of the highest-ranking Latinos in the industry, spent years logging tapes and lugging cameras before bigger doors started opening — a process he’s trying to make easier for others by spearheading diversity efforts in his side gig as chairman of the Television Academy…

After suffering vacancies last year during the pandemic, some of L.A.’s premier shopping districts are seeing a rise in leases: ‘A waiting list of people to come in at $100,000-a-month rent’ “I had a space on Melrose Place where we had five offers,” says commercial real estate broker Jay Luchs. “I honestly don’t even remember having that before COVID.” A year ago, L.A.’s top shopping streets in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood were hit hard by the pandemic, with dozens of vacancies as tourism and in-person retail sputtered. Now, heading into fall, Luchs has seen quite a turnaround: “I’m pleasantly surprised with how tenants and landlords have been back trying to get deals done.” In West Hollywood, which on Sept. 10 issued a vaccine mandate for restaurants, bars, gyms and…

The Academy Museum Store will be stocked with an array of unique film-themed merch, including pieces designed by Hollywood costume designers. “We want visitors to be able to take home exclusive and one-of-a-kind keepsakes,” director of retail Mariah Gelhard tells THR. “We pulled from the amazing pool of talent within the Academy’s membership, which allowed the product to be intrinsically related to film and our mission. This resulted in exciting collaborations.” For example, costume designer Ruth E. Carter, with Black Panther jewelry designer Douriean Fletcher, created a jewelry line developed from the original glass-gold mosaic tiles from the Saban Building’s iconic gold cylinder facade. Gelhard also notes a commission of made-in-L.A. vases by ceramicist Wayne Perry that riff on the museum’s cylindrical gold facade. There are Flores Lane soy candles…

When director Ry Russo-Young was in college, she created a performance art piece that cast her family as Little Red Riding Hoods, and her biological father — a sperm donor who’d spent years fighting the family for paternity rights — as the Big Bad Wolf. “I think playing those roles made things very clear,” she says now, nearly 20 years later, in Nuclear Family. “It was any blurriness that was hard to wrestle with.” But wrestle she does in her docuseries for HBO, which chronicles in painful detail the lawsuit that upended her childhood. The deeper she digs into the ordeal she endured, the more clouded the picture becomes by both love and fear. The story unfolds across three hourlong chapters. The first charts the courtship between the filmmaker’s parents,…

For The Velvet Underground, director Todd Haynes did not have the materials traditional to a rock documentary, like promotional videos and tapes of live performances. “What you have with The Velvet Underground is an experimental film from one of the greatest artists of the 20th century,” says Haynes, referring to Andy Warhol, the band’s de facto benefactor and promoter, who is a large presence in the film. To populate the doc, which bows stateside at the New York Film Festival before an Oct. 15 debut on Apple TV+, the director employed the work of New York avant-garde filmmakers like Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken and Jack Smith, which played over music tracks, archived audio and new interviews in lieu of the non-existent conventional band footage. Ahead of its Sept. 30 NYFF…