Innholdsfortegnelse for December 1, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

In Focus Since going public in June 2020, Warner Music has been a proxy for the digital music business writ large given that tech giants are less than forthcoming with data from their streaming services. One thing is clear: According to financial filings, Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music are the clear streaming leaders and account for 45 percent of Warner Music’s fiscal 2021 recorded music revenue. Of the three, YouTube appears to be growing fastest, now accounting for 11 percent of Warner Music’s revenue, compared with Apple’s 13 percent and Spotify’s 18 percent. Big Tech’s 2021 Payments to Warner Music…

Seeking waves in the parched California desert sounds like the delusion of a stereotypically stoned and sun-bleached surfer, but it’s about to be reality, thanks to three high-tech wave pools coming to the Coachella Valley. This should come as no to shock to Chris Hemsworth, Shaun White and Diplo, some of the lucky few who have already had the privilege of surfing 100 miles inland, at Kelly Slater’s invite-only Surf Ranch in Lemoore, California. Surf Ranch is the prototype for Slater’s newest project: a wave pool at Coral Mountain, a community planned for La Quinta, California, that will include a 150-room hotel and single-family homes starting in the high $2 millions. “Coral Mountain is meant to be a well-rounded sports and wellness community for the entire family,” says Michael B.…

While most events took the holiday week off, some stars flocked to NYC for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Darren Criss, Jordan Fisher, Kelly Rowland, Jon Batiste and Girls5eva actresses Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Paula Pell and Busy Philipps were among those riding floats, while animated stars including Grogu (aka Baby Yoda), Boss Baby, Snoopy and Paw Patrol’s Chase became high-flying balloons. Broadway’s return also was feted with performances of Six, Moulin Rouge!, Wicked and NBC’s Annie Live! Got tips? Email rambling@thr.com…

We did everything we could to make it be worth a trip back,” says Michael Patrick King — who is Zooming in from New York, where he has been consumed by his Sex and the City revival, And Just Like That, for the better part of a year. It was he, with buy-in from star Sarah Jessica Parker, who had initiated the follow-up, which rolls out as a 10-episode series on HBO Max on Dec. 9. King first joined the culture-defining, Emmy-winning comedy at the pilot stage and remained intimately involved until its finale, six seasons later. In the nearly 20 years since, the once “repressed Irish Catholic gay man” from Scranton, Pennsylvania, has remained prolific, creating a second critical darling in HBO’s The Comeback and a network hit in…

As a genre, true crime is about applying a comprehensible narrative to horrifying acts that otherwise would be beyond comprehension. Even as the events it depicts are disturbing, the genre is comforting because it relies on a structure through which we process the worst of human nature and behavior. The construction of narrative is at the heart of HBO’s four-hour limited series Landscapers. Applying modes of classic Hollywood storytelling and aesthetics, writer Ed Sinclair and director Will Sharpe use a 1998 double murder that fascinated the U.K. as a platform for a mystery and a love story. This is true crime, but as recounted by unreliable characters and calculatedly performative filmmakers. With the facts elusive, it’s left to stars Olivia Colman and David Thewlis to maintain a level of emotional…

At its fourth annual Celebration of Black Cinema and Television on Dec. 6, the Critics Choice Association will present its Career Achievement Award to Halle Berry, 55, who, 20 years after becoming the first (and still only) Black woman to earn the best actress Oscar for her performance in Monster’s Ball, has just embarked on a new chapter in her career. In Bruised, the new Netflix drama about a mixed martial arts fighter attempting a comeback, she not only stars but also makes her directorial debut. What called you to directing at this point in your career? You never really know when you’re ready to do anything. I harken it to having children: You don’t know when you’re ready to be a parent, you just decide that that’s what you…

Just as the global film industry thought it was coming out of the pandemic, omicron may pull it back in. On Nov. 26, the World Health Organization, led by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned that the risk posed by the new, heavily mutated variant of COVID-19, first discovered in southern Africa, was “very high.” Days later, more than 40 countries, including the United States, the U.K., the European Union countries and Australia imposed travel restrictions from southern African nations including South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe. The variant has since been detected in several nations, including the U.K., Canada, Germany, Hong Kong and Israel The news couldn’t come at a worse time for the global film industry, which after two years of shutdowns, cinema closures and box office collapse, had finally begun…

BEST PICTURE West Side Story On Nov. 29, just three days after the death of Stephen Sondheim, Disney held bicoastal screenings of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Sondheim’s musical (the New York one at Lincoln Center, appropriately enough), and people flipped for it. Sixty years after the original film won this award, its remake could too. Licorice Pizza MGM-UAR had plenty of reason to cheer over the Thanksgiving break as its new Paul Thomas Anderson movie set a pandemic record for an indie film’s first weekend with an $84,000 per-screen average. Granted, it opened on only four screens, but still encouraging news ahead of its Christmas Day expansion. The Lost Daughter Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut won four of the five prizes for which it was nominated at the Nov. 29 Gotham…

It’s hard to find, cell service is spotty, the threat of fire is high, and it’s over the Ventura County line. Yet Bell Canyon — the exclusive, 1,700-acre gated community north of Calabasas — is a celebrity magnet, where residents have included Niecy Nash, Jhené Aiko, Alyssa Milano, Trey Songz and Shaquille O’Neal. This year, This Is Us star Chrissy Metz shelled out $3.5 million for a Bell Canyon villa and emo rapper Lil Uzi Vert splashed out $4.4 million for a contemporary home while Joe Rogan (after moving to Texas) sold one of two residences he owned there. “It’s always been a destination community for celebrities due to the security, privacy and serenity,” says Pinnacle Estate Properties real estate agent Kevin Godley. Prices range from about $1.5 million to…

OUTLIER SOCIETY Led by president Elizabeth Raposo, Jordan’s production company reflects his diverse tastes. The slate includes adaptations of Charlie Jane Anders’ sci-fi coming-of-age novel Victories Greater Than Death as a series and Akwaeke Emezi’s upcoming romance You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty as a feature, both at Amazon. The banner also is producing Sony/TriStar’s adaptation of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth fantasy trilogy. OBSIDIAN WORKS The Black-led marketing agency, which includes CAA Foundation alum René Spellman and marketing vet Bobby Moore III as chief impact officer and chief strategy officer, respectively, has served as the multicultural agency of record for Jordan joints such as Amazon’s Without Remorse and Coach (he released his latest collection with the brand, a collaboration with artist Blue the Great, in October). OW…

Alana Haim is best known as one-third of the pop group Haim, which also features her sisters, Este and Danielle. Now, she can add movie star to her résumé after her film debut in MGM’s Licorice Pizza — something she didn’t think she’d ever do. But writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, the eight-time Oscar nominee who has directed music videos for the band, saw something in her that she wishes she “would’ve seen in myself” and made her the lead of his latest movie alongside Cooper Hoffman (also making his acting debut), son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. “No other director could have gotten the performance that he got out of me because I trust him,” says Haim. “He knew I could do it way, way before I knew I…

It was, in fact, Jane Campion’s first rodeo. In late 2019, the first female filmmaker to receive the Cannes Palme d’Or — for 1993’s The Piano, which also landed her two Oscar nominations, for best director and original screenplay (she won the latter) — found herself at a San Francisco-adjacent rodeo with her producer Tanya Seghatchian. “Maybe rodeos aren’t quite what they used to be,” laments Campion. “We kept being told to sit down.” Unconcerned with the bucking broncos and other ancillary theatrics, the duo were eyeing the riders, looking to populate their latest production, set in 1920s Montana, with convincing cowboys. “I found myself suddenly too grand to go and lean over the ring,” remembers the director, struck by the inherent ridiculousness of the proposition she would be shouting…

As Broadway returns, musicians go back on the road and talent across the entertainment industry looks to diversify income following the pandemic, New York’s Power Lawyers are there to negotiate and help clients navigate the new normal. In The Hollywood Reporter’s second spotlight, meet the 20 attorneys with specialties in theater, fashion, media and music who are at the forefront of deals and disputes. Lisa Alter Alter Kendrick & Baron New York University School of Law CORPORATE Amid a boom in music catalog sales, Alter has worked on transactions to the tune of more than $2 billion over the past year. She advised South Korean powerhouse HYBE, the home of BTS, in its acquisition of Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings; helped Primary Wave Music Publishing on deals for stakes in the…

Of all the great screen romances, there has never been one less likely — or more touching — than that of 1971’s Harold and Maude, which turns 50 on Dec. 20. (Paramount is marking the occasion with a remastered Blu-ray release Dec. 7.) The unlikely couple at the center of Hal Ashby’s offbeat comedy are a 19-year-old rich kid obsessed with death (Bud Cort, then 23) and a 79-year-old woman with a lust for life (played by Ruth Gordon, then 74, three years after winning the Oscar for Rosemary’s Baby). The two meet at a funeral, and love blossoms as they teach each other about living life to its fullest. The film was written by Colin Higgins, then 28, who devised a 20-minute version as a master’s thesis for UCLA’s…

How Broadway Quickly Assembled to Pay Tribute to Sondheim Hundreds of Broadway’s best gathered in New York’s Duffy Square on Nov. 28 to honor Stephen Sondheim, who died two days earlier at 91. “No speeches today, just some words from Steve,” said Lin-Manuel Miranda as he read from Sondheim’s book about writing lyrics, Look, I Made a Hat. During the performance of “Sunday” from Sunday in the Park With George that followed, tears rolled down the cheeks of many of theater’s biggest stars, including Sara Bareilles, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Josh Groban. The event’s producer, Erich Bergen, got the ball rolling only 24 hours before, with publicist Rick Miramontez, Michael J. Moritz, who conducted, and dozens of Broadway insiders spreading the word. Bergen tells THR, “I’m not a churchgoer, but…

Weddings Courtney Miller, a talent and literary manager at Stride Management, married E Petrakis, a senior video game producer at Recur, in a Sept. 24 sunrise ceremony at the Griffith Observatory. Births Freida Pinto announced the arrival of son Rumi-Ray, with husband Cory Tran, via Instagram on Nov. 21. Congrats Parag Agrawal was named CEO of Twitter after cofounder Jack Dorsey’s decision to step down on Nov. 29. Christina Spade was promoted to COO at AMC on Nov. 22. Scott Mills was elevated to CEO of BET on Nov. 22. Shavone Charles joined TikTok as head of diversity and inclusion communications Nov. 19. Raina Falcon was promoted to senior vp HBO Max publicity Nov. 17. Carolyn Newman was named executive vp global scripted at Blink Studios on Nov. 22. John…

The golden age of television is echoed in Amazon’s Being the Ricardos, which follows Lucille Ball (played by Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) during one week of production on the iconic ’50s sitcom I Love Lucy. “We wanted to pay homage to the era,” says cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth — a two-time Oscar nominee for The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — of his early conversations with writer-director Aaron Sorkin. For production designer Jon Hutman, who won an Emmy for Sorkin’s political drama The West Wing, research also included stops at the Hollywood Heritage Museum in L.A. and the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum in Jamestown, New York (where Ball was from). “This was a combination of authentic research, but reproduced through the filter of…

Chaotic.” That’s how Jamie Clayton (L Word: Generation Q, Sense8) describes her L.A. apartment before she began working with interior designer Davide Casaroli last year. “She’s very colorful and joyful,” says Casaroli, and her furnishings, collected by the actress over the years, reflected that. But because there was so much “going on,” as the designer puts it, Casaroli decided to pare back the number of pieces in the apartment while also adding structure and grounding the living room with a large oval rug. “We made it more functional, and we created more seating in the living room, which I wanted to be one space with different sitting areas.” To create extra flow in the space, Casaroli moved Clayton’s blue, whimsically patterned Matthew Williamson sofa away from the wall. “You can…

In the middle of an extraordinary year — 2020 — they were at work on films that charted other resonant histories. In Becoming Cousteau, Liz Garbus, 51, chronicles an emerging environmentalist; in Summer of Soul, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, 50, confronts the erasure of Black stories; in The Rescue, which he directed with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, 48, depicts the challenge faced by a group of unlikely heroes; in The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes, 60, chronicles a literal band of outsiders; in Procession, Robert Greene, 45, enables a group of trauma survivors to reenvision their own backstories; in Flee, Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 40, animates a refugee’s tale; and in Julia and My Name Is Pauli Murray, both of which she directed with Julie Cohen, Betsy West, 70, acquaints audiences with…

THR’s Raising Our Voices series is produced and curated by THR editors and presented by Walmart. In recent years, Disney Animation increasingly has turned to cultures that the nearly-century-old studio seldom has explored to tell stories more representative of the real world, even as they are infused with Disney’s signature magic. Moana was rooted in Polynesian mythology, Raya and the Last Dragon grounded its inspiration in Southeast Asian folklore and, now, Encanto finds its setting in South America. A magical realist ode to unconditional love and family values forged in hardship, the animated film centers on the Madrigal clan — proud Colombians who, due to a miracle, live in an enchanted house set in a fairy-tale landscape. Each member of the family has been blessed with an exceptional gift, save…