Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 18B, June 13, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

Life has always been difficult, a race from birth to death that you can only hope is populated with moments of transcendence and joy — a brief period of time that you endeavor to shape into something of meaning as you move through it. But for far too many, life is like some extreme competition show where the penalty for losing is far graver than being kicked off of an island or voted out of a house. The society we have collectively forged has become so tragically flawed, and yet, it is also an inescapable construct. These were some of the ideas flying through my head when I first conceived of Squid Game as a feature film more than a decade ago. Why write about poverty, strife, desperation and capitalism?…

Isn’t this what we all wanted in the first place?” asked Jenny Lumet, executive producer of The Man Who Fell to Earth, near the beginning of The Hollywood Reporter’s Drama Showrunner Emmy Roundtable. “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an amazing human moment on TV that makes you reevaluate your whole life.” Her hyperbole was not unjustified. The recent onslaught of prestige TV, while good for insatiable platforms and audiences, has made it more challenging than ever for creators to court the zeitgeist. So, when the voices behind a few of the fortunate projects to break through — This Is Us’ Dan Fogelman, Better Call Saul’s Peter Gould, Pachinko’s Soo Hugh, Lumet, The Dropout’s Elizabeth Meriwether, and Severance director and executive producer Ben Stiller — gathered over Zoom…

Tatiana Riegel’s long collaboration with director Craig Gillespie includes I, Tonya — the dark comedy about the Tonya Harding 1990s figure skating scandal for which the editor earned an Oscar nomination — and their latest, Pam & Tommy, for which she again had to walk a fine line between humor and seriousness. “For Craig to be attached to it, I knew there was going to be a certain emotional level to it,” she says of the Hulu limited series, which revolves around the marriage of model-actress Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and their notorious sex tape. “And it would be intriguing in addition to his comic sense, [showcasing] his ability to sort of walk back and forth between those two places in a lovely way.” Riegel, whose…

THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL (AMAZON) When we left Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) at the end of the third season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in late 2019, she seemed positioned for some stewing and consequences. In case you’ve forgotten — December 2019 feels like such ancient history it could be envisioned with a Flintstonian intersection of people and dinosaurs — Midge had just blown her biggest professional opportunity, getting fired from Shy Baldwin’s European tour after an improvised Apollo set that came dangerously close to outing the popular singer’s sexuality. The mistake felt like the climax of a season in which Midge was slowly moving outside of her insular bubble of 1950s affluence, setting her and the story up for growth within the tumultuous 1960s. Not so fast! Whether owing to…

With food programming now a staple of both TV and TikTok, it’s no surprise that viewers still have healthy appetites for stories about Julia Child, a pioneer in the cooking genre. Back in 2009, Julie & Julia featured Meryl Streep’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the chef as she worked on her seminal 1961 cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Premiering in March 2022, just after the launch of Food Network’s competition series The Julia Child Challenge, the first season of HBO Max’s Julia essentially picks up where Nora Ephron’s film left off. Starring Sarah Lancashire in the title role and David Hyde Pierce as husband Paul Child, Julia focuses on the genesis of her TV series The French Chef amid the cookbook’s popularity. Her groundbreaking show began airing weekly in…

DOCUMENTARY/NONFICTION SERIES Sketchbook This behind-the-scenes Disney+ series, which dropped in March, is instructional and personal, giving animation lovers the chance to see Disney’s artisans doing what they do and explaining how they came to the House of Mouse in the first place. The streamer has been actively promoting the show with a creative awards campaign. Music Box When HBO got into business with The Ringer CEO Bill Simmons, it surely hoped he could replicate the quality of the 30 for 30 series he presided over for ESPN. This six-parter, which covers everything from Woodstock ’99 to Kenny G, does just that. It’s at 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and has been renewed for a second season. They Call Me Magic Apple TV+’s attempt to recapture the magic of ESPN’s The…

BEL-AIR PEACOCK STAFFING THE ROOM For T.J. Brady and Rasheed Newson, the showrunners of the dramatic reimagining of the ’90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, personality is a major hiring factor. “We want a collaborative, enjoyable time,” says Brady. Adds Newson: “Everyone can write at this level — all the scripts are good. So chemistry is a big thing. Are they fun to write with? Can I deal with this person, day in and day out, for 10 to 12 hours a day?” COLLABORATION IS KEY “It’s not a democracy,” says Brady. “We have to take all these ideas and then cosign them, putting ourselves on the line. Ultimately, we have to believe in what everybody’s pitching and the people who can help us get there.” Having said that,…

HULU For Hulu’s comedic whodunit Only Murders in the Building, editors weave the story of three tenants in an Upper West Side New York apartment building — struggling theater director Oliver Putnam (Martin Short), young Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) and retired actor Charles-Haden Savage (series co-creator Steve Martin) — who team up as amateur investigators after a tenant turns up dead under suspicious circumstances. “It’s really balancing the three characters, to make sure that everybody had their say … and to just make sure that all the characters that are in the building were part of the story,” editor Julie Monroe says, adding that the edit also was about “always keeping that sort of pressure cooker of the apartment and all of its inhabitants, and still have the comedy of…

The Book of Boba Fett DISNEY+ To enable a Return of the Jedi-era Luke Skywalker to appear in the Lucasfilm Disney+ series, the VFX team effectively placed a CG head resembling actor Mark Hamill on footage of actor Graham Hamilton, who performed the scenes on set, while employing deepfake technology. To build on the work they did in the second-season finale of The Mandalorian, creator Jon Favreau during preproduction of Boba Fett urged a small VFX team to begin deepfake tests. “Jon was convinced that the deepfakes that we see on YouTube [would at some point] become so good that they would hold up at 4K,” VFX supervisor Richard Bluff of ILM says, adding that by employing what was learned on The Mandalorian, “we now understood that we needed to…

Loki DISNEY+ Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s first MCU project was the Disney+ series Loki — and we’ll be seeing more of her work in Ryan Coogler’s upcoming Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. For the look of Loki, starring Tom Hiddleston as the God of Mischief alongside Owen Wilson and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the DP and director/executive producer Kate Herron drew inspiration from moody, neo-noir references, including Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and David Fincher’s Seven and Zodiac. “It’s very character-driven, playing with shadows and dimension and space, as far as darkness and people going in and out of light to allude to certain things happening within the story and progression of time,” elaborates Durald Arkapaw of her approach to lighting the six-episode series, lensed at Trilith Studios in Atlanta and shot using the…

NETFLIX On season two of the Netflix series, Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) O continues her metaphysical journey, which this time involves time travel to the 1960s, ’80s and the World War II era, as well as “body swaps” with her mother, played by Chloë Sevigny. “I looked at [the time travel] as the characters going to a different location and focused on how they would act in these new locations and how the people in these locations would react to her,” says Todd Downing, who earned an American Cinema Editors Eddie Award nomination for season one before adding a co-producer title for season two. The body swapping in these time periods and locations was the main challenge, he adds. “Trying to find the right rhythm of cutting between two actors playing…

Gina Prince-Bythewood and Kasi Lemmons have had remarkably entwined careers as filmmakers. Both broke out with acclaimed debut features near the end of the 20th century: Love & Basketball (2000) and Eve’s Bayou (1997), respectively. Today, they’re both hard at work on their upcoming sixth movies, the former with The Woman King and the latter with I Wanna Dance With Somebody. They took breaks from their moviemaking to each direct an episode (Prince-Bythewood, the pilot; Lemmons, the finale) of the first season of the ABC anthology series Women of the Movement, the inaugural iteration of which focuses on Mamie Till-Mobley (Adrienne Warren), mother of Emmett Till, who was spurred to take action in the fight for civil rights after her 14-year-old son was brutally kidnapped, tortured and murdered after being…