Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 28A, August 5, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears is not your typical music documentary, especially given that its subject did not participate in the FX/Hulu film. But it is no doubt one of the most-talked-about docs of the year, with Spears’ controversial conservatorship taking center stage. While Framing Britney Spears does follow the singer’s rise to fame as a teenage pop star and the endless media scrutiny that had an impact on her mental health, it is less a biography than it is a piece of media criticism — and it also works as activism, elevating the conspiracy-theory-loaded #FreeBritney movement into the mainstream and ultimately bringing greater attention to Spears’ efforts to break away from her conservatorship. Framing Britney Spears is one of four music docs in the Emmy race…

To say that The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears caused a stir when it premiered Feb. 5 would be a grave understatement. The Hulu/FX documentary, which investigates the pop legend’s conservatorship and her fight to break free of it, sent shock waves rippling across the internet and beyond. Almost overnight, #FreeBritney became a household topic of conversation. Justin Timberlake, Perez Hilton and Sarah Silverman apologized for their past behavior and jokes directed at Spears, while others reflected on the misogynistic media culture that paved the way for what she has called an abusive legal arrangement. Yet director Samantha Stark and senior story editor Liz Day, who have done subsequent reporting in The New York Times, insist that their film was only the beginning. In a conversation with THR,…

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart relied on a huge amount of archival footage, including performances of Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb that span decades. “They run the gamut from film transfers to camcorder stuff,” says supervising sound editor Jonathan Greber. “Most of it pretty bad fidelity, some of it really bad, with noise layers on top of it.” The goal was to not only restore the archival material but also keep the sound authentic. “What I tried to do is keep it sounding like it really sounds,” he says. “If it’s going to be bad-sounding archival, let’s admit that it’s bad-sounding archival and live with it. If we can clean it up a little bit without changing it, let’s do that. There’s just a whole…

The opening moments of HBO’s postmodern superhero miniseries Watchmen were nothing short of terrifying: A panicked Black couple and their young son race through the fiery streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, witnessing — and narrowly avoiding — mass slaughter while white supremacists destroy a thriving district commonly referred to as “Black Wall Street.” Since its premiere in October 2019, much has been written about how this five-minute sequence did more to widely introduce audiences to this suppressed moment in history than any school curriculum ever could (not that many, if any, textbooks actually document the real-life Tulsa Race Massacre). Sepia-toned images and synthesized score cinematize cruelty to amplify the emotional impact of this violence in the Emmy-nominated Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre. Yet, watching History Channel’s two-part documentary…

ACTRESS IN A DRAMA UZO ADUBA In Treatment, HBO This versatile actress, just 40, has already won three Emmys in three different categories and could make it four in four if she is recognized for her portrayal of therapist Brooke Taylor in this HBO reboot. No other nominee shot more episodes this season (24), and none of their seasons finished rolling out more recently (June 28). But the series’ original star, Gabriel Byrne, never won. OLIVIA COLMAN The Crown, Netflix Could Colman’s fourth nom be the charm? She was previously nominated for The Night Manager, Fleabag and her first season as Queen Elizabeth II on this acclaimed Netflix show. Her work on season four has earned her Critics Choice, Golden Globe and SAG Award noms. The series’ prior QEII, Claire…

In Mapleworth Murders, Paula Pell plays a murder-mystery novelist in a quaint small town who takes it upon herself to solve the many real murders taking place all around her. If the premise brings to mind Murder, She Wrote — the CBS series starring Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, a small-town mystery novelist who also solves murders — that’s on purpose. Pell and co-creator and co-star John Lutz reveal it was a shared love for the long-running crime drama (and a mutual admiration for each other) that sparked their parody, which originally aired in 2020 on Quibi and is now a Roku Original since joining the Roku Channel lineup in May. Pell and Lutz have earned Emmy nominations for their performances as Abigail Mapleworth and Deputy Gilbert Pewntz (co-star J.B.…

The National Geographic/Disney+ series Secrets of the Whales — which features extraordinary cinematography and commentary, including some from executive producer James Cameron — earned Emmy nominations for documentary or nonfiction series, narrator (Sigourney Weaver) and cinematography for an episode that focuses on the sperm whale, the largest of the toothed whales, immortalized in Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick. In addition to finding suitable filming conditions — including the right amount of sunlight to penetrate the water — capturing the sperm whale on camera involves some unique challenges. “The whales are going down 3,000 feet for 40 minutes to an hour at a time, eating a ton of squid a day to sustain themselves,” explains Brian Armstrong, who with Andy Mitchell wrote, directed and served as one of the 20-plus cinematographers…

FULL FRONTAL WITH SAMANTHA BEE PRESENTS: PANDEMIC VIDEO DIARIES The digital team at Full Frontal With Samantha Bee was nearly ready to roll out a new behind-the-scenes segment documenting how the late night show gets made when the world shut down in March 2020. “We were about to shoot Sam for this beautiful, highly produced show, and then, we all went home and never came back,” says supervising producer Elisa Kreisinger. The lockdown forced them to pivot, and ultimately the Emmy-nominated Pandemic Video Diaries (which earned a nom for outstanding shortform nonfiction or reality series) came from a place of candor. “We needed a way to process how we were feeling and laugh at ourselves because there was not much else to do at the time,” says Kreisinger. “We thought,…

The documentary filmmakers Kirby Dick, 68, and Amy Ziering, 58, have been collaborating for 20 years. Despite being a bit of an odd pairing — she got her B.A. at Amherst and her Ph.D. at Yale, he dropped out of CalArts; she is divorced, he has been married for 35 years; she is intense, he seems laid-back — they bring out the best in each other. Indeed, while Dick’s first Oscar nom came for a doc he made without Ziering — 2004’s Twist of Faith, which explored sexual abuse in the Catholic Church — they have experienced their greatest successes on projects made together, also tackling subjects related to sexual misconduct: 2012’s The Invisible War, for which they were Oscar-nominated and won a Peabody Award, shined a light on abuse…

In HBO’s The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, director Frank Marshall follows Barry Gibb — the sole surviving member of the Bee Gees, the immensely popular trio that included his brothers Robin and Maurice Gibb — as he reflects on his family history and their ascent into pop stardom. (The trio’s youngest brother, Andy Gibb, was a best-selling solo artist before his death at age 30 in 1988.) While most might think of the Bee Gees solely as the band behind the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack — emblematic of disco’s most frivolous elements — the documentary portrays the trio as an ever-evolving and extremely influential group of artists who were inseparable musically and emotionally. The Gibbs not only survived the backlash to disco in the early…

When Eric Pankowski and co-creator Ben Winston started developing a spinoff of the recurring Late Late Show With James Corden segment in 2016, they never planned on breaking the mold. “Carpool Karaoke” was already a smash hit, racking up hundreds of millions of views on YouTube for Corden’s sing-alongs with megastars such as Adele, Elton John and Jennifer Lopez. But with Corden busy hosting his own show, someone else would have to take the wheel on Apple TV+’s Carpool Karaoke: The Series. Ultimately, the showrunners chose a “daunting” but exciting alternative: “What [if there is] no host?” Pankowski recalls pitching. “What [if we] take the spirit of ‘Carpool’ — which is getting different celebrities in the car [and] getting them to drop their guard — and have fun with the…