Innholdsfortegnelse for November 16, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

When the Newhouse family tapped veteran media executive Roger Lynch in 2019 to lead the crown jewel of their holdings, Condé Nast, he inherited a company of fiefdoms. Its magazines, infamously, competed with one another for advertisers and cover stars, while Condé’s international business was its own silo. Now three and a half years into the job, Lynch has tried to unify the company into one organization and has shifted investment toward digital and video, turning a storied magazine-company brand into a leading multiplatform player. I know video has been a top priority. You hired Agnes Chu from Disney to lead Condé Nast Entertainment. How are you thinking about investing in that space? You start with the pretty insatiable demand for high-quality content coming from streaming services. But the emphasis…

Fairly or not, three of awards season’s acting contenders might be judged on more than just their performances. On March 27, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, refused to leave the ceremony, accepted the award for best actor and then went out partying, sparking a tremendous uproar that led Smith to resign from the Academy and the organization’s board to ban him from its events for a decade (he remains eligible for Oscar recognition). Smith has since apologized to Rock multiple times, and Apple decided to move up from 2023 to December 2022 the release of a movie Smith produced and stars in, Emancipation, clearly hoping for awards recognition. Brad Pitt was accused by ex-wife Angelina Jolie, in legal papers filed Oct. 4 in Los Angeles County Superior…

For Mark Mylod, the director of Searchlight Pictures’ The Menu, the biggest challenge was setting the tone for the darkly comic thriller, in which a group of diners travel to a remote island to eat at Hawthorn, an exclusive restaurant run by Ralph Fiennes’ celebrity chef Julian Slowik — a dining experience that comes with some unexpected surprises (not of the gastronomical variety). “Trying to get the tone right… was really about me and the cast just talking a lot, and then the massive benefit of being able to shoot the film almost chronologically,” says Mylod of the movie, a class satire set primarily in the single setting of the Hawthorn dining room. “Everybody’s on set all the time, and you never know quite when the camera’s on you… That…

Seth MacFarlane was a 24-year-old Hanna-Barbera animator when Fox bet big on his pitch for Family Guy. Nearly a quarter-century — and one reversed cancellation (thanks to brisk DVD sales) — later, the uproarious and utterly inappropriate Griffins reach 400 episodes in 21 seasons with the Nov. 20 installment, “Get Stewie.” MacFarlane and co-showrunners Rich Appel and Alec Sulkin sat down with THR to commemorate a major Family Guy milestone. The climate has changed so much regarding this kind of humor, and yet you haven’t dulled your edge. How do you get away with it? ALEC SULKIN A lot of the credit goes to our writers, who come up with funny, edgy stuff all the time. And a lot of credit goes to Rich, who, with his legal background, is…

Before the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences hands out the winged statuettes for the 2022 International Emmy Awards, they should preface the event by saying: Mission accomplished. When the Academy held the inaugural International Emmys in 1973, the interest in, and market for, non-U.S. television was close to zero. This was the pre-cable, three-network world, and foreign programming, or diversity of any sort, was hard to find on the primetime schedules. A half-century later, international shows are all over the proverbial dial. Thanks to the number of streaming services now offering foreign programming, American audiences can watch just about every one of this year’s nominees. Figures from Whip Media, a U.S. company that runs a platform for worldwide content licensing, show that the share of non-U.S. titles viewed…

The Nov. 18 release of Bones and All — from director Luca Guadagnino and starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell — is not Hollywood’s first foray into cannibalistic romance. In 2007, Tim Burton brought Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd to the screen, with Johnny Depp portraying the vengeful titular barber and Helena Bonham Carter playing his love interest Mrs. Lovett, who helps turn his victims into meat pies. Before that, there was Eating Raoul, a sleeper comedy hit from 1982. Raoul was the brainchild of Paul Bartel. After studying film and theater at UCLA, Bartel got his start in Hollywood working for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Corman paid Bartel $5,000 to direct 1975’s Death Race 2000, which starred David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone and became a cult favorite. “In…

The afternoon email hit some inside CNN like a ton of bricks. The cable news channel, now under Warner Bros. Discovery (its second owner in just a few years) was going to face budget cuts and layoffs. “There is widespread concern over the global economic outlook, and we must factor that risk into our long-term planning,” CNN CEO Chris Licht wrote in a late-October memo. At a network town hall on Nov. 15, Licht confirmed to moderator Alisyn Camerota that layoffs will hit the division in December. Those cuts are part of an industrywide pivot, as media giants prepare for a difficult winter, seeking to reduce costs however they can. And news divisions will not be spared. At Disney, CEO Bob Chapek sent a memo to division leaders Nov. 11…

Jesse Eisenberg is a bit embarrassed to be here. It’s not because of the quality of the project he’s promoting — his new miniseries, Fleishman Is in Trouble, is based on Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s bestselling 2019 novel, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Rather, it’s the sheer fact that, as the face of this project, or any project for that matter, he’s the subject of interest from other people. “I’m so embarrassed that I’m a public person in the first place,” he says. The story follows a divorce between Toby (Eisenberg) and Rachel Fleishman (Claire Danes), narrated by Toby’s friend Libby (Lizzy Caplan). Viewers are shown all the ways in which a wealth-obsessed wife has antagonized her altruistic husband, before the other side of the story is revealed. It…

How to Play a Cannibal in 100-Plus Questions Michael Stuhlbarg says his first gig working for Luca Guadagnino, on 2017’s Call Me by Your Name, was “so buoyant, magical, fun, moving and really singular” that when the Italian auteur came calling with another part, it was an instant yes. The new film, the cannibalism-themed Bones and All, once again casts him opposite Timothée Chalamet. And, again, Stuhlbarg had lots of questions. Like, a lot. “Michael sent me and [screenwriter David Kajganich] something like a hundred questions, probably more than a hundred, in preparation for the character,” Guadagnino said at the recent AFI Fest premiere. The queries might make more sense after seeing Stuhlbarg’s turn as a mullet-sporting “eater” in a particularly creepy scene set around a campfire and a case…

German cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister created what he describes as an “authentic, intimate observation” and gave Cate Blanchett “editorial power” in lensing a crucial moment in Todd Field’s contemporary drama Tár, which stars Blanchett as fictional composer, conductor and EGOT winner Lydia Tár. The Focus Features film follows the maestro in a downward spiral, and Hoffmeister’s cinematography — which will be in competition at the Nov. 12-19 EnergaCamerimage cinematography festival in Toru?, Poland — employed a visual style that was a lot about restraint. “If you want to create a world that feels so real that it’s immersive, the visuality has to be authentic,” says the DP. “Todd would emphasize the idea of observation. For example, in the big concert hall for all the rehearsals, he was adamant that it should…

WHERE IS SHE NOW Chairwoman, Universal Pictures Power spot “The Grove. Trust me, it’s happening.” In 10 years, I’ll be… “I can’t predict, but hopefully, I’ll still be making films and feeling as challenged and rewarded as I do today.” Favorite movie/TV show The Deer Hunter, Gandhi, I Love Lucy, The Young Ones WHERE IS HE NOW CEO & Founder, MACRO Career milestone “Tim Story was my first director client, and I helped him make his studio directorial debut with a movie called Barbershop.” Power toy “Standard Motorola cellphone and a large-screen BlackBerry.” WHERE IS SHE NOW Co-chair, Warner Bros. Pictures Group Power toy “My [Apple] iPod.” Greatest challenge overcome in the biz “Making the right decisions for a movie, even if it means waiting longer to see things unfold.” First…

While making The Inspection, Elegance Bratton and his filmmaking team had to contend with shooting during the Mississippi summer in 100-degree-plus heat and a mid-production COVID shutdown that resulted in a four-month hiatus and a loss of a week’s worth of production days, straining an already tight timeline. “Filmmaking requires a lot of focus, but at the end of the day, I’ve been through much worse,” says the director, who previously earned acclaim with Pier Kids, his 2019 documentary. “I just remind myself: Twenty years ago, you were in a homeless shelter; however difficult this may be right now, it’s not as difficult as what you came from to get here.” A24’s The Inspection, partially inspired by Bratton’s experience in the Marine Corps, follows Ellis French (Jeremy Pope), a homeless…

There’s almost a tradition, when approaching divorce in popular fiction, to treat the end of a marriage as a mystery, a whodunit. It’s usually a trick question. Assigning blame in some divorces is a breeze, but in your typical marital-demise mystery, there will ultimately be a parade of shared complicity, Agatha Christie-style. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble, is partially a divorce whodunit with a very Jewish, Upper East Side accent. But it’s just as much an exploration of the divorce whodunit genre: a deconstruction of blame and recriminations and unhappiness at a certain age. On the page, while I loved Brodesser-Akner’s prose and her imperfect characters, I found the structure of the whodunit stifling and inevitable. Brodesser-Akner’s new eight-episode Fleishman limited series, produced by FX for Hulu,…

ALEX BORSTEIN Lois How did you get cast as Lois? I was working on MADtv, which was developed by Leslie Kolins Small, who at the same time was shepherding Seth with Family Guy. Originally, they thought Family Guy was going to be interstitials during MADtv. I did the pilot presentation. I met Seth and went in the booth and just started doing this voice. It was inspired by my cousin in Long Island but was slowah… and lowah. What’s your all-time favorite episode? Impossible to answer. I will say one we did recently, [season 21’s] “The Munchurian Candidate,” made me laugh so hard. Lois and Peter’s love life is stalled, and Lois would like him to pleasure her in a certain way. So they go to a therapist, who gives…

After opening in two theaters in December 2017, Guillermo del Toro’s Searchlight drama The Shape of Water never played in more than 1,000 locations until its ninth weekend, after picking up 13 Academy Award nominations. Searchlight, like other specialty and indie distributors, has for decades relied on what’s known as a platform release to nurture art house titles. Now, the traditional platform model is an endangered species after consumer behavior changed in the pandemic era — particularly among older moviegoers — and two high-profile cinemas catering to indie fare closed in Los Angeles: the ArcLight Hollywood and the Landmark on the Westside. This year’s Oscar contenders are expanding more quickly because limited runs aren’t producing the sorts of grosses they previously did. But if a movie doesn’t capture a broad…

BEST PICTURE Babylon Damien Chazelle’s three-hour epic for Paramount, one of the last big awards hopefuls that had not yet screened, was unveiled at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Nov. 14, with Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt in tow. It proved to be highly polarizing. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery The sequel had a Nov. 14 L.A. premiere at the Academy Museum, starting a week of screenings with star-studded Q&As. On Nov. 23, it’ll be Netflix’s first film to play in AMC, Regal or Cinemark theaters before hitting the streaming service Dec. 23. BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE Fire of Love On Nov. 10, the Sara Dosa doc tied with The Territory for most Cinema Eye noms. The next day, it outpaced all other films in the IDA Awards noms and…

Halloween Ends put Peacock on Nielsen’s streaming charts for the first time — and those charts shed light on the choice to debut it day-and-date. The movie grossed $41.2 million from theaters during its Oct. 14-16 bow while racking up 717 million minutes of viewing from paying users on the NBCU platform — equal to more than 6.4 million full showings of the film. The streaming figure is a big win for Peacock, which trails its rivals significantly in subscriber count (it has only 15 million paid subs). But opening box office returns were estimated at $50 million, so some viewers seem to have opted for the couch rather than the theater.…

They were not prop dishes. They were curated at the level of a three-Michelin-star restaurant,” explains chef Dominique Crenn of the food served onscreen in Searchlight Pictures’ new dark comedy The Menu. The renowned chef behind San Francisco’s Atelier Crenn was sent the screenplay for Mark Mylod’s film when the production was looking for a consultant who could help them nail the creation of Hawthorn, the film’s remote fine-dining restaurant where guests pay $1,250 a head. Crenn, the only female chef in the United States with three Michelin stars, helped the filmmakers bring to life the dishes as described in the script as authentically as possible, while also making tweaks that would be accurate to the story’s setting of an island in the Pacific Northwest. She helped fill the screen…

Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds, Octavia Spencer, Tracy Morgan, Sunita Mani, Patrick Page, Marlow Barkley, Aimee Carrero, Andrea Anders and Jen Tullock walked the red carpet in NYC on Nov. 7 for the premiere of their Apple original film Spirited, which puts a musical comedy spin on Charles Dickens’ classic story A Christmas Carol. “So much of what I’ve learned as I’ve grown older, and I’m grateful for, is it’s OK to suck at something at first in order to be good at it; if you’re willing to do that, you can do some pretty fun, incredible things. I’m not a natural singer and dancer, by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel like I got as close to a black belt in adequate as I could to get through…

Couples who work together navigate the dance between personal and professional in a variety of ways. For Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani — the married duo who earned an Oscar nomination for their original screenplay for The Big Sick in 2018 — the lines are clearly drawn. “There are office hours, Monday through Friday,” says Gordon. “At the end of the week, I clean my computer and turn it off.” Adds Nanjiani, “If we’re hanging out, and one of us gets an idea about work, we have to ask permission to bring it up. Sometimes the other person says, ‘No!’” There are some weeks when that can prove challenging. Gordon, a former therapist, and Nanjiani, the actor best known for HBO’s Silicon Valley and for starring in The Big…

Lauren Palmer was 15 years old when she set out on a seven-night Nickelodeon cruise of the Mexican Riviera. This was 2009, the apex of popularity for the actress’ teen sitcom True Jackson, VP, and the only condition placed on an all-inclusive vacation for her entire family was that she spend a few hours signing autographs on the lido deck. She’d been looking forward to the break. But as the ship drifted from Los Angeles to Puerto Vallarta, its young passengers mainlining sugar and getting slimed in the branded photo booths, Palmer rarely strayed from her cabin. “I felt like I was walking around in a SpongeBob suit that I couldn’t take off,” she says. “I was trapped. I couldn’t leave my room without someone coming up to me calling…

“Permanence was a new reckoning,” says Lila Neugebauer of directing Apple’s soulful film Causeway. The 37-year-old director had made a name for herself in New York in the past decade for helming acclaimed off-Broadway plays like Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves and Tracy Letts’ Mary Page Marlowe before making her Broadway debut with a 2018 production of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery — which earned a Tony nomination for best revival of a play and won stage and screen veteran Elaine May her only Tony, for best actress in a play. Neugebauer was comfortable in that medium — she says that theater “is invested in its own fragility and ephemerality. It’s expiring in front of you in real time.” But Hollywood was already calling: In 2018, she…

That the Christmas spirit is no longer what it once was is the discontent at the heart of Disney+’s The Santa Clauses, which sees Tim Allen’s Santa pondering retirement after nearly three decades on the job. But was it ever? This is a franchise that began — in the 1994 film The Santa Clause — with a bitterly divorced salesman killing Santa the night before Christmas. Its spun-sugar holiday magic has always been askew — and with the latest addition from creator Jack Burditt, it’s taken on a distinctly sour taste. Here is a Santa who gripes that “Saying ‘Merry Christmas to all’ has suddenly become problematic” and huffs at the idea that deeming a kid too naughty for presents is “brat-shaming.” He’s taken aback to realize that the adorable…