Innholdsfortegnelse for September 6, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

On Aug. 17, days after its strike passed the 100-day mark, the WGA West issued a call for lawmakers and regulators to look into the deals of three Hollywood giants: Netflix, Disney and Amazon. “Pay and working conditions for writers have become so dire, and media conglomerates so unresponsive, that 11,500 writers went on strike,” stated the WGAW report. “Without intervention, these conglomerates will seize control of the media landscape, and the streaming era’s advances for creativity and choice will be lost.” For decades, competition enforcers essentially rubber-stamped many so-called vertical mergers — the combination of firms in different parts of a supply chain, rather than direct competitors — under the theory that they lower production costs and ultimately lead to lower prices for consumers. This changed under the Biden…

Last summer, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion rights groups saw a flood of interest and activism nationally — and from Hollywood. Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Hamilton team raised money for a fund called Ham4Choice that funneled donations to nonprofits that provide abortion access. Harry Styles and Lizzo donated millions to organizations like Planned Parenthood and Physicians for Reproductive Health. Inside Amy Schumer and The Daily Show name-checked such small groups as The Brigid Alliance, which arranges and pays for travel for people seeking abortions, sending new donors their way. And in November, Phoebe Bridgers and Maggie Rogers raised more than $75,000 for The Brigid Alliance through a 24-hour rerelease of their cover of “Iris.” But more than a year later, the rush of giving has slowed,…

Striking writers and actors are pressing a few common issues as they seek better contracts from the media companies represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. One big one: Both unions want more transparency about how many people are watching streaming series and movies and, along with that, a bigger share of streaming revenue via residuals or success-based metrics. That’s a marked change from the earlier days of the streaming boom, when freedom from the bottom-line nature of Nielsen ratings was often seen as a selling point for streaming services over broadcast or cable television outlets. “Since streaming networks don’t release numbers, it’s fortunately quality over ratings,” showrunner Sam Esmail told THR in 2018, as he was launching the series Homecoming for Amazon Prime Video. Coming off…

Sandra Hüller doesn’t stand on protocol. “Oh, it’s you,” she says, slipping quickly into the informal German “du” when she recognizes me. “Can you give me five minutes? I just have to dump my shopping and make sure the dog’s OK.” We’re meeting early at a designer hotel in Cologne, Germany, a spot favored by visiting film crews for its proximity to the train station — just across the street — and its relative anonymity. Hüller, dressed in bell-bottoms and sneakers, a jean jacket thrown over a plain white T-shirt and with no makeup, has the morning off after an outdoor shoot for her next film was canceled due to a thunderstorm. She gets her dog sorted with a walker — more on the dog later — and sits down…

It’s like asking a woman when she’s crowning, ‘Do you want to give birth, again?’ ” explains Patricia Arquette of being asked about future directing ambitions while still waiting to screen her debut. “You’re like, ‘Not now!’ ” Arquette’s feature, Gonzo Girl, is an adaptation of the book by Cheryl Della Pietra, who drew on her time as Hunter S. Thompson’s assistant in the 1990s for a fictionalized story about an aspiring writer who is tasked with extracting the latest novel from a drug-addled iconoclast. The script first came to the Oscar-winning actress, who had begun talking to her agents about nascent directorial aspirations, as an offer to star. In reading it, she saw the chance to explore themes, according to Arquette, that included — but were not limited to…

The Boy and the Heron How lucky for us that Hayao Miyazaki, the animation master with a gift for enchanting world building, didn’t stay retired. The prolific Japanese filmmaker makes an exciting return with The Boy and the Heron, which opened in Japan this summer. Inspired by Genzaburo Yoshino’s novel How Do You Live?, The Boy and the Heron chronicles the adventures of a bereft youngster who discovers an abandoned tower and a persistent gray heron while exploring his new town. Dumb Money I, Tonya and Cruella director Craig Gillespie’s latest, based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network, might be the most exciting offering in an already crowded market of projects looking at the GameStop stock mania of 2021. Paul Dano plays Keith Gill, whose posts on Reddit have…

A quasi-memory film with the out-of-body feel of a waking dream, All of Us Strangers is in some ways a companion piece to Andrew Haigh’s stunning 2011 breakthrough, Weekend. But it also feels like something new, strange and soul-stirring that the director has been working toward his entire career. Adapting the 1987 novel Strangers, by Japanese author Taichi Yamada, Haigh has rendered the story acutely personal, making the protagonist a queer writer in his 40s and downplaying the ghost elements of his dead parents to move into more psychological and profoundly emotional territory. For a generation of gay men, especially, the film’s reflections on coming of age in the 1980s, making it through the AIDS epidemic and readjusting, or not, to the more relaxed norms of sex in the post-crisis…

In addition to the chaos of the strikes, Hollywood is facing a moment of reckoning after some of the costliest franchise installments in history were washed out to sea at the 2023 summer box office, while such original fare as Barbie and Oppenheimer created a surprise cultural tsunami. A box office aficionado would have to go back years, if not decades, to find another summer where two of the five top-grossing movies in North America were fresh and original nonfranchise tentpoles. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie tops the 2023 season with a current domestic haul north of $600 million and more than $1.34 billion worldwide for Warner Bros. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, from Universal, has earned more than $300 million domestically and nearly $800 million globally. Then there’s Sound of Freedom, the indie…

When Mark Thompson was hired as CEO of The New York Times in 2012, he knew that he was facing skepticism from within the storied news organization, wary of the TV executive coming in with a mandate to transform its business. “An outsider has many disadvantages, but one advantage is a ‘cold eye,’ ” Thompson recalled in a case study for the global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in August 2020, shortly after his departure from the Times was announced. “In this case, I took the job because, besides all the problems and the difficulty of change in a legacy media organization, I thought there was also immense potential.” Now, Thompson will bring that “cold eye” to CNN, where he was named chairman and CEO on Aug. 30. As with…

When Robert Forster’s Favorite Haunt Closed, He Surprised New Owners With a Gift In an interview for the 10th anniversary of West Hollywood seafood hotspot Connie and Ted’s, James Beard Award-winning chef and owner Michael Cimarusti served up a heartwarming anecdote about the late Robert Forster. When the restaurant opened in 2013, it replaced the beloved diner Silver Spoon, a favorite hang for working actors. “We did get a bit of backlash,” Cimarusti says. Forster, who was at the Silver Spoon “every day,” told the new owners that when the diner closed, “I’m probably going to Starbucks. I’m going to buy a cup of coffee, park my car, and I’m going to sit here,” Cimarusti recalled. Sure enough, a few days later, there was Forster behind the wheel of his…

CASSINA The Italian furniture manufacturer’s astounding three-level space, designed by its art director, architect Patricia Urquiola, features modular works by the late Virgil Abloh as well as pieces by Charlotte Perriand and Gaetano Pesce. 145 N. Robertson Blvd., cassina.com HABITAT HOME & GARDEN The first L.A.-area outpost of the Central California-based business celebrates coastal life with a range of rustic wood furniture and sun-bleached accessories. No wonder the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are customers. 21249 PCH, habitathomeandgarden.com INNER GARDENS The longtime garden emporium, now in a new location in a former bank building in Culver City, is a treasure trove of landscape designer Stephen Block’s intriguing global finds and the company’s collection of reproduction pots. 4444 Sepulveda Blvd., innergardens.com LDV Previously available exclusively via an invite-only online platform, LDV’s…

THE ORIGINS OF THE NFL’S streaming business can be traced, in part, to a party at Bill Gates’ house outside of Seattle several years ago. The event was timed to a summit that Microsoft was hosting, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell recalls chatting with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos there. “I was just talking about our content and what it could do for their technology,” Goodell says, noting that he felt the NFL could help Amazon build its advertising business and Prime Video subscription service. “I distinctly remember, he was wearing sunglasses and he put them down on the end of his nose,” Goodell adds. “And he said, ‘Now you’ve got my attention.’ ” Amazon would go on to cut a deal to simulcast Thursday Night Football games beginning in 2017…

I’M YOUR MAN Playing a hilariously malfunctioning robot in Maria Schrader’s sci-fi rom-com made Hüller feel like her “robot brain was actually glitching.” IN THE AISLES Hüller became an officially licensed forklift operator to play a supermarket shelf-stacker in Thomas Stuber’s sweet romantic drama, co-starring Franz Rogowski. REQUIEM She won the best actress Silver Bear in Berlin for her debut film, playing a young woman with severe epilepsy whose staunchly Catholic family orders a brutal exorcism. SIBYL In her laugh-out-loud cameo in Justine Triet’s Sibyl, Hüller looked to her director for inspiration. “Sandra told me she was actually imitating me,” says Triet. TONI ERDMANN Playing a workaholic corporate consultant whose life is disrupted by her prankster father, Hüller runs the gamut from poignant to slapstick.…

French filmmaker Ladj Ly could scarcely have hoped for greater success with his 2019 feature-length directorial debut, Les Misérables. Born and raised in Paris’ immigrant suburbs — known as the banlieues — Ly, now 43, had been documenting the everyday hardships and injustices faced by his community since he was a teenager. Les Misérables shone a global spotlight on that project. The film, which deploys the crime thriller genre to viscerally depict the relentless cycles of police brutality against Black and Arab youth in Paris, won the jury prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, four César Awards, including best film, and was nominated for an Oscar in the best international film category. Perhaps more important to the issues Ly cares about, French President Emmanuel Macron told local press outlets…

Our industry has ingrained such an idea of what to expect from a prison story,” says filmmaker Greg Kwedar, who is hoping to change that narrative with the help of those whose stories had been misrepresented. Kwedar’s Toronto-bound feature Sing Sing centers on the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program run out of the eponymous prison that sees inmates producing and acting in stage productions. The story centers on the real-life friendship of RTA alumni John “Divine G” Whitfield (portrayed by Colman Domingo) and Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, who plays himself. The film chronicles the bond that develops between the men as they try to decide which play to perform next. Outside of a few professional actors, including Domingo and Oscar nominee Paul Raci, Sing Sing is populated with formerly…

As Hollywood fairy tales go, few are as enchanting as that of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, whose second sequel — My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 — opens Sept. 8. It all began in the summer of 1997, with a one-woman show written and performed by Winnipeg-born Nia Vardalos (a former member of Chicago’s Second City), staged in the cramped Hudson Backstage Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard. Rita Wilson, who’d recently launched Playtone Productions with husband Tom Hanks, noticed a tiny ad for the play in the Los Angeles Times. (The ad was paid for by Vardalos with her final $750.) The title made Wilson chuckle, as did the subject matter — her mother is Greek and her Bulgarian father was born in Greece — so she bought tickets.…

Lauren Sánchez was honored at This Is About Humanity’s fifth annual fundraising soirée Aug. 26, after donating more than $1 million to the organization that benefits separated and reunified families at the U.S.-Mexico border. At the event, held at Henry Winkler’s Los Angeles home, Sánchez was supported by Eva Longoria, Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner as well as fiance Jeff Bezos, whom she thanked “for inspiring me to go out into the world and make a difference.” Of the cause, she also stressed the importance of “treating people with love, compassion and humanity and giving them a crucial step up.” Winkler closed out the night by leading a call for donations, and in noting that all funds would be matched by the Bezos family, Winkler joked, “I’d like to be…

Dig through the 120-plus Emmy categories and you’ll discover more than double-digit nominations for Succession and Ted Lasso. You’ll also uncover the indisputable influence of hip-hop. The ever-growing television medium is keeping the legacies of two of the most important figures in rap — and overall pop culture — alive, and now the projects are competing for Emmys. Dear Mama, the FX documentary series about Tupac Shakur and his activist mother, Afeni, earned nominations for outstanding documentary or nonfiction series and writing for a nonfiction program, while a virtual reality concert that brought Notorious B.I.G. back to life is up for outstanding emerging media program. To top it off, rap’s ultimate entrepreneur, Jay-Z, is nominated for two Emmys, including a historic one for outstanding directing for a variety series for…

When Bethann Hardison co-created the Black Girls Coalition in 1988 — a group formed with Iman and Naomi Campbell to shine a spotlight on women of color in modeling — she didn’t know she was laying the foundation for a discussion about diversity in fashion that would continue for decades. “I just wanted to celebrate Black models. I wanted them to see each other,” says Hardison, the subject of the new documentary Invisible Beauty. Directed by Frédéric Tcheng (Dior and I, Halston) and in theaters Sept. 15, the film details the fashion industry’s history of racial exclusion and Hardison’s unflagging efforts over decades to push for progress. The title Invisible Beauty is a nod to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, in which an unnamed Black man narrates what life…

Pedro Almodóvar, the most celebrated Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel, will be the toast of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. There, his latest film — Strange Way of Life, a short Western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal and set to be distributed by Sony Classics — will have its North American premiere; he’ll receive the Jeff Skoll Award in Impact Media at the TIFF Tribute Awards; and he’ll participate in an “In Conversation” discussion on Sept. 9. Almodóvar has made 21 features, among them classics like 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which was nominated for the best foreign-language film Oscar; 1999’s All About My Mother, which won that Oscar; and 2002’s Talk to Her, for which he was nominated for best director and won…

Long before it was officially announced in late 2017 that Saudi Arabia’s 30-year ban on cinemas would be lifted, there had been widespread gossip throughout the country that the news was incoming. “There was this rumor going around that there were theaters in malls already, and they’d just pull the curtain back and be like, ‘Ta-da, cinemas!’ ” says Alaa Fadan. As Ibraheem Al Khairallah recalls, “I remember looking around and thinking, ‘Is that the corner of a cinema?’ ” But Fadan and Al Khairallah weren’t simply Saudi movie fans eagerly waiting in anticipation. As co-founders of pioneering content studio Telfaz11 alongside fellow multihyphenate Ali Kalthami, they’d spent years carefully preparing themselves and their company in order to take full advantage for whenever the historic news would land. As Fadan…

Here comes the fall festival circuit during the history-making double union strike. In these still uncharted waters, there remain quite a few unknowns. For instance, it’s unclear how interim agreements — either signed or not — will affect a project’s potential for pickup. Then, there is the question of whether AMPTP studios — supposedly sitting on stockpiles of cash — will be looking to buy given a lack of new content, or if they will abstain with an uncertain negotiating road ahead. In the weeks leading up to the festival, there was chatter about how studios, including Netflix, had been messaging that they would not be buying projects that had signed interim agreements. (Netflix had no comment.) If a streamer did sign on to these agreements, they would indeed be…

There’s possibly no cheesier word in the Valentine’s Day card section than “soulmates.” But it seems a fitting distillation of what kept virtuoso conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre, together through 27 years of complicated marriage, as depicted in Bradley Cooper’s transfixing biographical love story, Maestro. Making thrilling use of the subject’s music, this is a layered examination of a relationship that might be oversimplified today as that of a closeted gay man and his “beard.” Cooper and co-screenwriter Josh Singer dig deeper to depict a union fraught with conflicts yet unbreakable. It’s no slight to Cooper’s A Star Is Born remake, his first turn in the director’s chair, to say his follow-up is a leap in terms of accomplishment. Coincidentally, Maestro also marks the…