Innholdsfortegnelse for October 6, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

In September, a talent agent at CAA was gearing up to try to poach a star client who is represented by ICM Partners. But after CAA’s blockbuster acquisition of its rival on Sept. 27, the agent put the pitch on hold. “We were told to stop all that kind of stuff for now,” this rep says, speaking under the condition of anonymity. “Hopefully she’ll end up with us anyway.” While there may be a detente between the Century City-based firms, business is anything but normal. Even as the agency leaders use such key words as “partnership,” workers at both companies are fearful, sources tell THR. Many remember what happened during the merger of WMA and Endeavor in 2009, which resulted in many layoffs, especially on the WMA side. Concerns this…

In making a play for brand advertising dollars, three local TV giants have launched or recently rebooted news programming geared for a national audience, seeking to carve out a piece of a pie long dominated by broadcast and cable news outlets. There’s a gold mine out there: The data firm Kagan estimates that CNN, Fox News and MSNBC together generated more than $2.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2020, driven by the hotly contested presidential election. Nexstar, which owns 199 TV stations in 116 U.S. markets, is rebooting its NewsNation cable channel, building primetime around former ABC News chief legal analyst and Live PD host Dan Abrams. It also is folding in reporting from The Hill, the digital news brand it acquired in August for $130 million. Sinclair Broadcast Group,…

Lifestyle Fixer “People are spending money like it’s going out of style,” says Jaclyn Sienna India, founder of Sienna Charles, a boutique travel company that she has transformed into a lifestyle concierge firm. Its new membership model runs its clients — billionaires, studio heads and celebrities — $150,000 a year. For the one percent, according to India, the pandemic prompted a pivot toward more extravagant purchases. During the height of COVID-19 travel lockdowns and bans, India got her clients into hard-to-enter places (think Azerbaijan), tricky tasks that epitomize the “fixer” nature of her evolved business. “We’ve done whatever people need,” says India. “We get a request, it’s my vision, and the team [of eight] goes and executes it.” It might be a celebrity for a child’s birthday — she’s working…

Following Sept. 25’s A-list gala, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures continued its string of opening-week celebrations with a premiere party, co-hosted by Vanity Fair, on Sept. 29. Robert Pattinson and H.E.R. were among the event’s co-chairs, with guests including Rebel Wilson, Natasha Lyonne, Zooey Deschanel, Jacob Elordi, Manny Jacinto, Finn Wittrock, Yuh-Jung Youn and director Shaka King. Attendees explored the galleries while also enjoying cocktails and music on the top floor, ahead of the museum’s public opening Sept. 30. Got tips? Email rambling@thr.com…

Danny Strong was all of 8 years old when he began sending letters to what was then the William Morris Agency. A latchkey kid in Manhattan Beach, he’d watched Silver Spoons and Diff’rent Strokes, thinking, “I should be on TV.” By 10 or 11, he’d found a kindred spirit in Quentin Tarantino, then just a “bombastic clerk” at Strong’s favorite video store. “I started spending all this time talking to him, and he’d recommend movies to me,” says Strong. “They all started calling me Little Quentin. It’d be like, ‘Quentin, Little Quentin’s here.’” In his 20s, Strong landed acting roles in TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, later, Gilmore Girls. By his 30s, he’d added screenwriter to his résumé, penning the Emmy-winning political dramas Recount and the follow-up…

Adam Lilling, founder of PLUS Capital, which works with talent on launching brands, moved in 1995 into an office in Culver City, whose glory days as the home of MGM and RKO were long past. “The office we were in always leaked,” he recalls. “My perception was it was just a sleepy place.” Fast-forward to 2021: Amazon Studios, WarnerMedia, Apple and TikTok have all taken office space in the city in the past four years, joining Sony, which purchased the old MGM studios in 1990. Culver City, says Jeff Pion, vice chairman of commercial real estate power player CBRE, is now “one of the content capitals of the globe.” The new demand for streaming content, the 2012 arrival of light rail with the Expo Line, an abundance of existing studio…

“My mom would do it this fast all the time,” says Kieran Culkin, sprinting through exhibits at New York’s American Museum of Natural History — a Cro-Magnon family, some big-horn sheep, was that a giant millipede? — as I scramble to keep up. “She would come in here with seven kids, throw a quarter into the admissions, and we’d just run through. We’d climb shit. Security would yell at us.” They still are yelling at him. Today, a guard recognizes Culkin and shouts in a thick New York accent, “Roman’s da man!” a reference to his character Roman Roy — the scene-stealing scion he plays on HBO’s Succession, the Learian family drama poised to return for its third season Oct. 17 following a year-plus COVID-19 delay. We were supposed to…

I’M FULLY VACCINATED,” Suzanne Scott volunteers as she stretches out her arm to offer a hand. Once innocuous, the handshake has become an iffy ritual in the pandemic era. But here at Fox News Media’s midtown Manhattan headquarters, everyone entering the building must show proof of vaccination or submit to daily testing. Never mind that the network’s loudest voices have cast themselves as vaccine skeptics; more than 90 percent of Fox Corporation’s full-time employees have taken the shot. Scott, 55, became only the second CEO in company history and the first female to lead a major news operation when she was promoted to the top job in May 2018. (She signed a new multiyear contract in February.) At the time, Fox News was still recovering from a cascade of sexual…

It’s important enough to understand the origins and realities of America’s opioid epidemic that I’m hesitant to dismiss Hulu’s occasionally informative, less frequently entertaining new limited series Dopesick. Not everybody has the time to read books or watch in-depth documentaries or the myriad condemnations of Big Pharma on every comedy-news show, so if the presence of cinema’s best Batman in a scripted series is what it’s going to take to open some eyes to a national crisis, then so be it. Still, despite powerful performances from Michael Keaton and several of his top-tier co-stars, the series features a frustrating selection of questionable storytelling choices and bizarrely bad turns from typically unimpeachable actors as it interweaves real-life and fictional characters. Adapted by Danny Strong (Recount) from Beth Macy’s book, Dopesick offers…

In August, a high-profile actor was on the set of a film when he came down with COVID-19 and was hospitalized. The star, known to the cast and crew as being dismissive of vaccines and masks, was said to be unvaccinated. The film shut down for three weeks, but not before more than a dozen crewmembers got sick, sources say. Ultimately, the stoppage resulted in a seven-figure hit for the production company. THR is withholding the actor’s name because he didn’t flout any specific protocol on the project. The actor’s rep declined to comment. Though Hollywood might appear unified when it comes to embracing such COVID-19 preventive measures as vaccines, the reality is more divided, mirroring the broader American population, where 44 percent are not fully vaccinated, according to the…

To hear TV executives tell it, the advertising business couldn’t be better. “The upfront was historic,” Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said Sept. 14 during a Bank of America conference, calling the market “tremendously strong.” Discovery touted its “most successful upfront ever,” and NBCUniversal trumpeted double-digit pricing and volume growth. But the endless superlatives obscure a business in transition as consumers and companies shift from linear television to streaming. Then there’s the measurement fiasco: the networks’ war with Nielsen, which has provided TV ad currency metrics for 60 years. Though total TV advertising is set to top $60 billion this year, according to media agency Zenith, the market is expected to shrink by 4 percent in 2021, which creates incentive to stop digital giants from stealing business. The TV giants’…

“I’ve been saying this forever, us Realtors bust our balls seven days a week, 24/7, and there’s no awards. We finally got it right here in Hollywood!” said The Beverly Hills Estates brokerage cofounder Branden Williams at THR’s first Power Broker Awards, held Sept. 22 in West Hollywood and presented by The Society Group, a public relations firm. The ceremony was preceded by a private dinner to honor L.A. Realtors who made THR’s 2021 list of Hollywood’s Top Real Estate Agents. “It really felt like a family affair,” said Douglas Elliman’s Fredrik Eklund of the evening. Winners included Philanthropic Impact honoree Santiago Arana of The Agency, Media Maverick awardee Jason Oppenheim of Selling Sunset fame, and The Beverly Hills Estates, which nabbed the Stratospheric Sale award for its listing on…

This decade [has] to be about women having each other’s backs,” said Kate Winslet in her Sept. 19 Emmy acceptance speech for HBO’s Mare of Easttown. Around the world, the international film and television industry’s most powerful women had already been hard at work with that mission. Female producers, studio executives and channel bosses are seeing a historic opportunity to capitalize on the seismic changes wrought by the #MeToo movement to push for true inclusion and diversity across the entertainment business. But impressive advances in onscreen representation have not been matched by gains in corporate power structures, where, at least at the very top and particularly outside the United States, it is still very much a man’s world. “A lot of work needs to be done in the C-suite, where…

Cinesite’s 30th Anniversary Launched three decades ago as filmmaking was taking transformative steps away from celluloid and toward digital processes, Cinesite remains on course in creating digital visual effects and, more recently, feature animation. A lot has changed since Eastman Kodak founded Cinesite in Los Angeles in 1991 as a VFX, digital restoration and mastering subsidiary based around its Cineon technology. Early Cinesite milestones included a pioneering digital restoration in 1992 of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and digital color timing of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), lensed by revered cinematographer Roger Deakins — among the first full features to involve what’s now known as the digital intermediate process. Antony Hunt joined in 2003 as managing director and in 2012 led a management buyout of Cinesite,…

Of all the major titles heading to the 2021 BFI London Film Festival, there’s one feature that stands out as perhaps the most perfectly selected in the lineup: Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho. Were it not for the fact that the festival’s main gala screening venue moved this year from its traditional base in Soho’s Leicester Square to the Royal Festival Hall on the banks of the Thames, audiences watching the U.K. premiere of Wright’s time-twisting thriller could literally have left the cinema and turned straight into the famed neighborhood where it was set and shot. Starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy, Last Night in Soho follows a young fashion student, Eloise, in present day who finds herself transported back to 1966 London and into the body of a…

→ Projects produced under IATSE’s Basic Agreement, whose extension expired Sept. 10. That applies to major film and TV titles produced by divisions of CBS, Columbia Pictures, DreamWorks, Marvel, Warner Bros. and MGM, among others, as well as streamers including Netflix and Disney+. → Projects covered under the Area Standards Agreement, whose extension also expired Sept. 10 and in general applies to workers employed outside of New York and Los Angeles, like those in the busy production hubs of Georgia and Louisiana. Signatories of the agreement include Columbia Pictures Industries, Screen Gems Productions, Touchstone Television and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. → Projects covered under the Videotape Agreement. That deal, which expired Sept. 30, covers talk, reality and game shows for companies including ABC Signature Studios, Cartoon Network Studios, MRC…

The Beverly Hills Hotel and its Polo Lounge are symbols of Hollywood — the intersection of executives, celebrities and the ultimate power lunch. So it was a fitting place for a meeting between Brian Robbins, the newly anointed president and CEO of Paramount Pictures, and Emma Watts, the president of its motion picture group. Following the unceremonious ouster of her former boss, veteran studio chief Jim Gianopulos, on Sept. 13, the future of Watts became the focus of much speculation around town. Many assumed Robbins would bide his time letting her go, given his lack of experience making big-budget studio event pics. But after his lunch with Watts at the Polo Lounge, less than two weeks after Gianopulos’ exit, she was out. Studio culture can be brutal. Nearly all newly…

Vanderbilt (HARPERCOLLINS, SEPT. 21) BY Anderson Cooper, Katherine Howe AGENCY UTA The rise and fall of one of America’s most well-known families is told by one of its own, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, as the story moves from the wharves of old Manhattan to Gilded Age Fifth Avenue apartments to present-day New York. Trashlands (MIRA, OCT. 26) BY Kim Yau AGENCY Echo Lake Set in a climate-change-altered Appalachia, where plastic is the traded currency, a single mother works as a plastic “plucker” while trying to find her son, who has been kidnapped and sold into child labor.…

Spears Decision: Not the End, But a New Beginning to the Saga? Though Jamie Spears’ temporary removal as conservator of daughter Britney Spears’ estate on Sept. 29 seems to point to a possible end of the legal saga, for Erin Lee Carr, the director of the new Netflix doc Britney vs Spears, it suggested a jumping-off point for more deep dives. “We are at this incredibly interesting inflection point in that the court is now going to be looking at the practices inside the conservatorship,” Carr tells THR. “There’s almost a way now for the real story behind the story that was exposed in our film [to be told].” Carr was monitoring the hearing from the East Coast, but one key figure in her documentary, cinematographer Andrew Gallery, was among…

LUCIA ANIELLO, PAUL W. DOWNS, JEN STATSKY This trio managed a twofer with Hacks, delivering a comedy that brought welcome buzz to HBO Max and a deft skewering of the entertainment industry to a town that loves watching itself. Replicating its success in a new project is something both of the series’ studios — Warner Bros. TV, where Aniello (also of Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club) and husband Downs just signed their first deal, and Universal TV, where The Good Place alum Statsky reupped in August — want. But season two of the Jean Smart vehicle will take priority for the three, fresh off their shared Emmy for writing. Current show-runner crush Downs: “PEN15’s Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine.” My big frustration with pandemic protocols Aniello: “No one can appreciate my…

In what is possibly the year’s most anticipated small-screen premiere, Succession begins its third, pandemic-delayed season Oct. 17. The HBO drama — or is it a comedy? — arrives almost precisely two years after the second-season finale, with Kendall Roy’s cliffhanger act of betrayal. THR’s TV critics check in with the fictional media dynasty we love to hate. DANIEL FIENBERG In the real world, a lot has happened since season two of Succession aired in October of 2019, from COVID-19 to an election booting a presumptively dynastic, assumptively wealthy family from the White House. Those on the TV beat have written extensively about the rise of Performatively Nice TV in the vein of Ted Lasso, shows that offered a salve to a wounded nation rather than exposing our corrosive rot…

MIPCOM Oct. 11-14 Cannes Global expansion and internal consolidation are the two overarching trends shaping the international TV industry, which will come together for MIPCOM in Cannes in what will be the first in-person TV market since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Streaming services are rapidly rolling out worldwide — for example, WarnerMedia is bowing HBO Max in Spain and the Nordic territories this fall, followed by Central and Eastern Europe and Portugal next year. And consolidation in the form of production companies — Fremantle, Banijay, All3Media, Keshet, Endeavor Content — is gobbling up competitors, or leading others to join forces with international creatives in a battle with Netflix, Disney, Amazon et al. for access to top creative talent. That struggle is certain to drive up prices for the…