Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 22A, June 10, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s Unpregnant has everything you’d expect from a classic road trip buddy comedy with plenty of humor and hijinks — but it’s also about a much more serious and political topic than most. In the HBO Max telefilm, Veronica (Haley Lu Richardson) learns she can’t get an abortion in her home state without parental permission, so she enlists her former best friend Bailey (Barbie Ferreira) to drive her across the country to an abortion clinic. Along the way, the teens encounter myriad unexpected obstacles, from carnival rides to a car chase, all the while finding themselves and rekindling their bond. In a discussion with THR, Richardson and Goldenberg reflect on how they first met, the challenges of tackling abortion in the telefilm format and how they built an…

The Queen’s Gambit, Netflix’s blockbuster limited series about an orphaned pill-popping chess prodigy, is not known for knee-slapping humor. But there’s a scene early in episode three, titled “Doubled Pawns,” that delivers a laugh-out-loud moment thanks to a one-word line delivered by a character who, upon finding out he must square off with Anya Taylor-Joy’s Beth Harmon, immediately knows his fate. “Shit,” he says. The 27-year-old actor who utters that line, Lukas Frank, is perhaps better known for his musical résumé (the indie singer-songwriter goes by the moniker Storefront Church), which is why he also contributed in a bigger way to the show’s fourth episode with an original song and score that play during an emotional scene involving the fate of Beth’s mother. Oh, and he is also the son…

Simon Godwin was preparing a stage adaptation of Romeo & Juliet at the National Theatre when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, shuttering theaters and putting the show’s future into question. To salvage the project, the director was tasked with transforming the play, starring Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley, into a film — his first ever. The finished product, PBS’ Great Performances: Romeo & Juliet, is a 90-minute hybrid between stage and screen filmed at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre, in what Godwin calls “a really exciting way of capitalizing on the very particular conditions that we were given.” Godwin spoke to THR about bringing his vision for the stage to the screen and how the production (replete with masks and COVID testing) served as on-the-job training for the director. What were the…

Teyonah Parris says she really didn’t know what she was getting into when she auditioned for WandaVision. But the Marvel drama, part spoof of classic sitcom formulas and part heart-wrenching coda to the Avengers movies, may be an auspicious beginning to something much greater for the 33-year-old actress, who broke out with a recurring role on Mad Men and a starring role in the feature Dear White People. She’s taking the WandaVision part of Monica Rambeau, an agent who acquires mysterious powers during the course of the show, to the big screen in The Marvels — the sequel to the $1.1 billion-grossing Captain Marvel being directed by Nia DaCosta. But first, she’ll star for DaCosta in the spiritual sequel to the 1990s horror classic Candyman. She spoke with THR about…

DOCUMENTARY SERIES ALLEN VS. FARROW HBO Oscar nominees Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering zeroed in on the 1992 accusation of sexual abuse against Woody Allen by his daughter with Mia Farrow, Dylan Farrow. The project, which landed the Farrows’ cooperation but not Allen’s, features never-before-released footage of Dylan describing what happened shortly after it allegedly occurred. The series earned big ratings and an 82 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. CITY SO REAL Nat Geo Two-time Oscar nominee Steve James directed this portrait of the Windy City he calls home. Its first four episodes premiered at Sundance in 2020 and center on the 2019 mayoral election to succeed Rahm Emanuel; a fifth, shot amid the pandemic and racial tensions after the police killing of George Floyd, was added in time for the…

As the entertainment industry was in the thick of figuring out how to make content during a pandemic, the creators behind three disparate television projects — HBO’s Coastal Elites, Netflix’s Social Distance and Freeform’s Love in the Time of Corona — took the challenge further: They figured out how to craft content about the pandemic, even as the world seemed to be in a constant state of change. COVID-19 had set back plans to shoot a stage version of Coastal Elites, screenwriter Paul Rudnick’s collection of scathingly funny and poignant sociopolitical monologues. But HBO devised a plan to safely film — even with Rudnick, director Jay Roach and the A-list cast including Bette Midler, Dan Levy and Issa Rae being scattered across the country — through the lens of Zoom,…

An American Pickle (HBO Max) Seth Rogen stars as a Jewish immigrant who is preserved for 100 years after falling into a vat of pickles and wakes up in modern-day New York. He unites with his descendant (also Rogen) in this comedy that was originally planned as a Sony feature film. Sony sold it to Warner Bros. in early 2020, and the studio released it on its new streaming service in August. THR’s review stated that “its soulful sweetness outweighs its flaws.” Robin Roberts Presents: Mahalia (Lifetime) Orange Is the New Black star Danielle Brooks plays gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in this Lifetime drama, which traces her rise to becoming arguably the best-known gospel singer in the mid-20th century as well as a civil rights activist who sang at the…

Netflix’s Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel revisits the 2013 death of Canadian student Elisa Lam at the infamous downtown L.A. hotel, highlighting how the story shed light on the rise of online sleuthing and cyberbullying, the hotel’s notorious history, the current state of L.A.’s Skid Row and the stigmatization of mental health. Director Joe Berlinger discusses the challenges he faced while completing the series and why he didn’t want to simply make a “spooky, haunted-house tale.” What was the impetus for this project? When that elevator footage [of Lam at the Cecil Hotel] went viral in 2013, I was fascinated by it but never really thought that I could add anything to the dialogue because it was a well-known story. The whole meditation on this story [was]…

We serve the queen. We don’t serve ourselves,” showrunner Suzan-Lori Parks told The Hollywood Reporter during a January 2020 visit to the Genius: Aretha set in metro Atlanta. But just two months later, production would come to a standstill because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before shooting resumed in September 2020 to complete the remaining three episodes, Parks tweaked the scripts to make sure scenes met the new COVID-19 protocols. “I think it altered the energy for the better,” Parks said in a follow-up interview when the show aired in March. “We really had to come together even more, as we had to stand 6 feet apart. We knew we were making something very beautiful, and we knew [putting] safety first was the only way we were going to cross the…

Many audiences were first introduced to Debbie Allen as cane-wielding dance instructor Lydia Grant on the early-’80s television series Fame. With the Netflix documentary Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, 2020 audiences were able to glimpse the real-life teachings of the famed multihyphenate. “That’s how the world first met me — as the teacher,” says Allen, speaking to THR the day after receiving a Kennedy Center Honor alongside fellow 2021 honorees Joan Baez and Dick Van Dyke. Dance Dreams follows Allen, the instructors and students at the Debbie Allen Dance Academy as they prepare for the annual performance of their version of holiday classic The Nutcracker. The doc pairs Allen with director Oliver Bokelberg. The duo had worked together on the Shonda Rhimes series Scandal — Allen as a director and…

James McBride, whose National Book Award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird was made into Showtime’s limited series, commends co-creator/star Ethan Hawke for guiding the difficult project to fruition. “This is a guy who could do anything he wants,” says McBride, adding metaphorically, “and he picked up the whole house and he walked it from New York to L.A.” The story focuses on the quixotic campaign by Bible-thumping abolitionist John Brown (played by Hawke) to spark a slave revolt just before the Civil War. McBride talked about his approach to the subject and his impressions of the adaptation. This is a rollicking chronicle based on real people and actual events. How much of it is fancy and how much is fact? I’d say 80 percent is based on fact. Onion [a…

I really couldn’t tell my story, honestly, in 90 minutes,” says director Alex Winter with a laugh. Sure enough, the only image of Winter — who is perhaps best known to audiences as Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill & Ted trilogy — appears briefly as the opening credits of Showbiz Kids come to a close: an early headshot from his childhood fades in and out of view following a long line of other former child stars’ photos, many of whom appear in HBO’s documentary to discuss the highs and lows of working as child actors in Hollywood. “This is a project I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” says Winter, who himself began acting in his youth and was performing on Broadway by the time he was…

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (HBO) Patton Oswalt executive produced this docuseries based on the book by his late wife, Michelle McNamara, which chronicles her obsessive search for the identity of the Golden State Killer, who terrorized Californians from 1976 to 1986. Love Fraud (Showtime) Filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady employed private detectives and a bounty hunter named Carla in their wild and unexpected search for Richard Scott Smith, a serial con man and bigamist who defrauded numerous women through romance scams. Murder on Middle Beach (HBO) Director Madison Hamburg attempts to solve the 2010 murder of his mother, Barbara, and mend the familial cracks her death left in its wake. But Hamburg’s sleuthing brings dark secrets to the surface, complicating his search for the truth. A Wilderness…

It would have been foolish to bet against Mike Nichols’ six-hour adaptation of Angels in America at the 2004 Emmys. The $60 million production had everything going for it: Nichols at the helm; Meryl Streep, Al Pacino and Emma Thompson in the cast; and Tony Kushner’s landmark 1991 play, set in AIDS-ravaged 1980s New York City, as its source material. Sure enough, Angels broke a miniseries record held by Roots that night, winning 11 of its 21 nominations. (That record held until 2008, when HBO’s John Adams won 13 of its 23 nominations.) It was a long road to that moment. Auditions were held in late 2001 for what would be a 12-month shoot. Jeffrey Wright was the only actor from the original Broadway cast to reprise his role, playing…