Innholdsfortegnelse for October 5, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

There’s an adage dating back to TV advertising in the 1970s: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” And while Netflix and Disney+’s ad tiers will not quite be free, viewers will be able to subscribe to the services at discounted price points as long as they can tolerate a few ads. The launches arrive as the digital ad industry is mid-evolution. Third-party data, the information users indirectly give to companies by granting permission to track what they’re viewing across the internet (i.e., “Do you accept these website cookies?”), has been the backbone of the online ad ecosystem since the turn of the millennium, but it’s under fire as big tech responds to regulatory scrutiny around data privacy. Amid the shifting tides, one thing has become…

Prime Video 1.25B minutes viewed 2 episodes The good news is that The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power opened at No. 1 on Nielsen’s streaming charts, racking up 1.25 billion minutes of viewing time for its first three-plus days of release. The less good news is that, while 1.25 billion minutes is a strong showing for a running time of just two hours and change, the very expensive Rings of Power didn’t put much distance between itself and Amazon’s The Wheel of Time, which had 1.16 billion minutes of viewing for a three-episode premiere in November.…

Stars are getting their minds and bodies shaped into top form at the hottest new wellness spaces, including a clubby referral-only Pilates studio, a mind-body mat class, the debut Clmbr studio and a Bali-inspired outdoor wellness sanctuary with NFT membership passes. THE CLASS Decorated with nods to lunar phases, the new Santa Monica studio of Taryn Toomey’s The Class — whose fans include Gwyneth Paltrow and Alicia Keys — marks its first permanent West Coast location. The emotive, mat-based sessions (also available via The Class’ digital studio) mix in squats, burpees, Pilates, dance cardio and meditation to a carefully calibrated playlist. Says Toomey, a former luxury fashion exec, “I hope that the space will help people leave the outside world behind, ground themselves and reap the benefits of our signature…

The two-week-long New York Film Festival kicked off Sept. 30 with the world premiere of White Noise, helmed by Noah Baumbach and starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Sam Nivola, May Nivola, Raffey Cassidy and Jodie Turner-Smith. Of adapting the 1985 Don DeLillo novel, a book some have called “unfilmable,” Baumbach told THR, “I reread the book and it was right when the pandemic happened, and the vibe of it felt like what the world felt like to me. I was just like, ‘I’m just going to do this,’ and I started showing Greta pages and she’d say, ‘I think this is something.’ And so I just kept following that.” Got tips? Email rambling@thr.com…

Issa Rae → Ryan Murphy “I recently worked with a member of his crew and they reported how present and specific he is. Given how prolific his work is … GOALS!” Steve Blackman→ Phoebe Waller-Bridge “I love her fearless approach to storytelling.” Greg Berlanti → Jon Favreau “He brought the quality level of big-budget action shows to a new level. Watching The Mandalorian must have been like being at the studios before sound and seeing The Jazz Singer for the first time.” Soo Hugh → David Simon “He doesn’t always do the ‘sexiest’ or ‘loudest’ shows, but every one that he does feels like an intricate kaleidoscope of humanity from bird’s-eye to on-the-ground.” Darren Star → David E. Kelley “Prolific and consistently smart and entertaining after all these years.” Shonda…

Not long ago, Brad Herman, the right-hand man to hush-hush Hollywood, invited a longtime client, legendary Motown songwriter Eddie Holland, to a private visit with another client, The Supremes’ Cindy Birdsong, who since September 2021 has resided in a Los Angeles-area care facility after two strokes that have left her unable to walk or speak. Herman, who says he’s been granted power of attorney over the singer, had worked with Birdsong’s family members to extricate her from a previous living arrangement. “Eddie puts his hand behind her head, very delicately, sweetly, saying, ‘Cindy, I’m really happy to see you,’ then he just sat there real close and sang in her ear: ‘Baby Love,’ ‘Love Child,’ ‘Someday We’ll Be Together,’” Herman recalls, eyes tearing, rolling up a shirtsleeve to show a…

By several metrics, 2022 has been a good year for women in the international film and TV business. UCLA’s annual Hollywood Diversity Report found the percentage of women in lead acting roles has nearly doubled over the past decade; that their share of writing credits has more than doubled; and that the percentage of women directors has increased by more than fivefold (from 4.1 percent in 2011 to 20.5 percent in 2020). In the U.K., the BBC’s most recent impact report on gender parity (in March) found that 61 percent of all BBC teams achieved 50 percent representation of women in their content, up from 35 percent in 2017. In June, Walt Disney Co. released employee data showing near exact pay equity, with women at the company earning 99.4 percent…

After two years of COVID-enforced virtual events, leading international television confab MIPCOM is looking to reestablish its claim to the title as “the mother of all entertainment content markets” with its 2022 event, running Oct. 17-20 in Cannes. Organizer RX France is expecting more than 10,000 attendees from some 96 countries and a who’s who of small-screen power players, including all the studios (Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, Paramount, MGM and Fox Entertainment) plus Netflix, indie production giants Fremantle, Banijay, ITV Studios, BBC Studios, Red Arrow and All3Media, and such national champions as France’s StudioCanal and Gaumont, Italy’s Rai Com, Scandinavian platform Viaplay and Japan’s Fuji Television. All will be looking to feed an ever-growing global appetite for content. Among the hundreds of new shows and formats debuting at MIPCOM…

Finding a new host for The Daily Show wasn’t on anyone’s to-do list at Comedy Central. Not anytime soon, anyway. That changed Sept. 29, as the face of the network’s late night franchise, Trevor Noah, revealed on air that he’d be stepping down after seven years in the role. Until then, executives including Noah’s boss, MTV Entertainment Group CEO Chris McCarthy, who’d had lunch with Noah the previous day, believed he would be staying put at least through the 2023-24 season. After all, he had re-upped his eight-figure deal for two more years at parent company Paramount Global in June. Then, in a stunning twist, Noah announced that he was done. “We were completely shocked,” says one high-ranking insider, with others there acknowledging they’d watched Noah’s signoff with mouths agape.…

The NFL’s decision to move its Thursday primetime game to streaming is looking like a sound one in the early going. Through its first three weeks, Thursday Night Football on Amazon’s Prime Video is averaging 11.93 million viewers, per Nielsen. That’s well above the same three weeks in 2021, when the NFL Network carried the games, although short of what the league draws for its Sunday games on CBS, Fox and NBC. Amazon won rights to the Thursday games as part of a massive $100 billion rights package the league negotiated with media companies in 2021. The tech giant’s Prime Video had already been streaming Thursday games as they aired on Fox and NFL Network, but the new package gave Prime Video exclusive national rights to the midweek package (games…

Best of Friends Friends (RIVERHEAD, SEPT. 27) BY Kamila Shamsie AGENCY A M Heath Spanning Karachi to London, this frothy, sweet novel opens as two teenage girls witness the historic election of Benazir Bhutto and follows their relationship through to adulthood. What seems like a straightforward friendship tale keeps you guessing. Stay True (DOUBLEDAY, SEPT. 27) BY Hua Hsu AGENCY UTA The New Yorker staff-writer has achieved near rock-star status with his ’90s coming-of-age memoir: His Brooklyn launch party this fall drew 400-plus fans, an honor befitting his gorgeous, gut-wrenching story of a young friendship that ended tragically.…

During the height of the pandemic and in the months since, Hollywood productions routinely cut corners while trying to balance tight filming schedules against strict COVID-19 safety protocols, some insiders say. In September, a former HBO health adviser, Georgia Hesse, sued CineMedics for wrongful termination, claiming she was fired for raising a red flag that the third-party COVID-testing vendor used an unapproved and inferior test during the production of HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. Hesse’s complaint alleges that HBO was aware of the fraud but ignored it in order to keep the production on track, endangering crewmembers and violating industry safety protocols. “It’s unknown to Plaintiff, at this point, why producers and HBO favored a vendor who lied to them, ripped them off, fabricated medical records…

Atrio “California is where I grew up, and I’m still hugely inspired by California coasts — it’s where my design journey began and it’s only fitting that Atrio’s beginning is here, too,” says interior designer Jeremiah Brent (Ellen Pompeo, Shawn Levy) of his first store. Located at Culver City’s Platform, the lifestyle boutique showcases exclusive collaborations, including Cultiver linens and Serax tableware, a flower shop, pantry, home goods and clothing. A restaurant, Juliet, opens soon. 8888 Washington Blvd., shopatrio.com Galerie Baruch In 2016, Rhett Baruch opened his Koreatown apartment as a shoppable space, filled with the work of young, talented artisans, ceramicists and furniture designs as well as intriguing anonymous pieces he found in his travels around the city. Now he’s opened a space in Melrose Hill, giving him another…

The showrunners highlighted on these pages are all too sharp to crib low-hanging Dickens — yet, for the writer-producers fueling entertainment’s most prolific and popular medium, it really is the best and not-so-best of times. Upward of 560 scripted series are expected to air in the U.S. by year’s end, as the industry hires more new voices than ever. There are comedy breakouts (see Abbott Elementary and The Bear) and behemoth dramas (House of the Dragon and Squid Game). But studio consolidation, libraries getting yanked from streamers without warning — looking at you, HBO Max — and shorter episode orders putting a financial squeeze on scribes farther down the food chain have added an asterisk to the idea of “Peak TV.” Both sides of this coin are evident in THR’s…

MAX BORENSTEIN Though he has more than a few creator credits on his résumé, Borenstein really courted the zeitgeist, controversy and even a little A-list ire with Lakers dynasty drama Winning Time on HBO. NKECHI OKORO CARROLL, ANNA FRICKE. The CW’s future may be in limbo, but its present is defined by two women building multi-series franchises (Okoro Carroll’s All American and Fricke’s Walker) as others get axed. CHRIS ESTRADA The stand-up who previously only dabbled in TV made his exceptional debut as a creator-star in August with This Fool, Hulu’s half-hour comedy about family dynamics set in a gang rehabilitation center. WILL GRAHAM It’s not easy to update a beloved film IP, but that’s what Graham and co-creator Abbi Jacobson have done with Amazon’s A League of Their Own…

Any film dramatizing the killing in 1955 Mississippi of 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till, one of the most indelible 20th century horrors of American racism, raises questions as to whether the material is enlightening or traumatic. In her wrenching Till, Chinonye Chukwu (who explored the psychological toll of the death penalty in her 2019 breakthrough, Clemency) circumvents that issue by refusing to depict the murder onscreen. The film focuses on the aftermath, as the victim’s mother fights for justice and finds her voice as a civil rights activist. Whether the ascent of Mamie Till-Mobley from her quiet, middle-class life in Chicago to a national civil rights platform succeeds as a subject for drama is a question not satisfactorily answered in the screenplay by Michael Reilly, Keith Beauchamp and Chukwu. Till is…

The Oct. 3 announcement by Apple, the distributor of the most recent best picture Oscar winner, that it will release Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, a film starring Oscar’s most recent best actor, Will Smith, in 2022 rather than in 2023, sparked widespread speculation about how members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will react to the film and its central performance. Oscar voters will, of course, be evaluating it less than one year after Smith’s infamous slap of Chris Rock — en route to winning the best actor Oscar for King Richard — at the 94th Oscars, which caused the Academy considerable embarrassment and led to Smith being banned from attending the ceremony for the next decade. THR went directly to the voters to find out, surveying dozens…

After a summer movie-going boom, September 2022 was a bummer as Hollywood studios ran out of all-audience event titles to release as a result of pandemic-related supply-chain issues. Revenue came in at $330 million, the worst showing in 26 years, according to Comscore. (That excludes September 2020, during the heart of the pandemic.) Though September always has been a sleepy box office month, before the COVID-19 crisis, its revenue hadn’t fallen below $500 million or so since 2005. Source: Comscore…

Inside the Changing of the Guard at Sunset Tower Change is afoot at one of Hollywood’s preferred stomping grounds. Gabé Doppelt, who replaced Dimitri Dimitrov as Sunset Tower’s beloved maître d’ in October 2018, is prepping to bid adieu and join hotelier Jeff Klein’s other industry hotspot, San Vicente Bungalows. Beginning in March 2023, Doppelt will segue to the Bungalows, where she’ll focus on membership ahead of a planned expansion for Santa Monica and New York (where she will relocate). “She possesses an uncanny instinct for putting people together and taking care of people,” Klein says of the well-connected Brit, who previously worked as an editor at Tatler, Vogue and W. “She is at once cozy and unflappable, making sure customers never feel slighted or unappreciated while quietly calculating who…

Two of the most high-profile, closely watched criminal cases of the #MeToo era are headed to trial in October, starting within a day of each other. Harvey Weinstein and Danny Masterson will face juries at the Clara Shortridge Foltz courthouse in downtown L.A., defending against allegations that they raped multiple women. Weinstein is charged with 11 counts of sex crimes, including rape, in connection with the assaults of five women from 2004 to 2013, which cumulatively carry a sentence of up to 140 years. Masterson is charged with three counts of rape between 2001 and 2003, which collectively could mean up to 45 years in prison. Both have steadfastly maintained their innocence. Ahead of the trials, THR spoke with legal observers who note that sexual assault exists in a special…

Who hasn’t dreamed of living in a hotel, à la the famous children’s book heroine Eloise? In Los Angeles, this is increasingly becoming a possibility with the rise of luxury branded residences, which combine condo living with some of the biggest brands (and the services they offer) in the hospitality industry. Branded residences such as the Mandarin Oriental Residences, Rosewood Residences Beverly Hills, Four Seasons Private Residences, Aman Beverly Hills and the Pendry on the Sunset Strip are rising in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills at a surprising clip. With properties ranging from $3.6 million and up at the Mandarin Oriental to the $75 million listing for the penthouse atop the Four Seasons residences, the biggest names in real estate are betting on the future of multiunit living in Los…

PRO ROOM “It makes a world of difference, especially for a comedy. Zoom is a pretty brutal way to try and write jokes. There is really no substitute for the natural rhythms of in-person interaction, both for breaking story and for comedic timing.” Elizabeth Berger PRO ZOOM “I hope to never be back to an in-person writers room. I like the focus Zoom brings to the process. You have to stare at each other, there’s nowhere to go. And trying to get a couple of my writers to focus if we were in person would be near impossible. Not saying any names, but Bobby Wilson likes to roam hallways and talk to strangers.” Sterlin Harjo…

At 91 minutes, Netflix’s 2019 documentary Abducted in Plain Sight was both tedious and tawdry, infuriatingly repetitive and repetitively infuriating. The idea that Peacock’s A Friend of the Family tells the same story over nine hours caused me immediate trepidation. The series was created by Nick Antosca and bears some resemblance to his Hulu minis The Act and Candy, relying on duration and bad hairpieces to find subtle heart in an otherwise sensationalistic story. A Friend of the Family is drawn out far past the limits of my interest, and its insights plateau, but — led by Eliza Hittman, who directs episodes one and three — it’s at least sensitively told with a mostly superb ensemble. Set in 1970s Idaho, the miniseries focuses on the Brobergs — florist Bob (Colin…

After decades of false starts and years of delays for construction and the pandemic, the $484 million, Renzo Piano-designed Academy Museum finally opened to the public in September 2021. Since then, the museum has exceeded expectations by drawing 700,000 visitors (20 percent more than its goal), and it is easily covering its operating expenses via ticket sales, memberships (24,000 sold to date), a successful gift shop, renting the space for events and its annual gala (see page 82). On the occasion of the museum’s one-year anniversary, THR spoke with Academy Museum director Jacqueline Stewart (who ascended to the position in July after serving as its head artistic and programming officer) and chief operating officer Brendan Connell Jr. about the institution’s surprising visitor demographics, their response to the critique that the…

After a highly successful first outing in 2021 (raising $11 million and featuring a surprise performance by Lady Gaga), the Academy Museum gala returns Oct. 15 with a dinner on the open-air Dolby Family Terrace. Supported by Rolex (a founding supporter of the museum), the evening is co-chaired by Academy Museum trustees Halle Berry, Jason Blum and Ryan Murphy, along with Lupita Nyong’o. Funds raised will go toward the museum’s access, education and programming initiatives. (For ticket info, contact museumgala@oscars.org.) Similar to last year, the performer won’t be announced ahead of the evening, which is being planned by gala creative director Lisa Love (West Coast contributor to Vogue) and artistic director Raúl Àvila (the event designer behind the Met Gala). Àvila is mum about the theme for this year’s gala.…