Innholdsfortegnelse for November 29, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

When Elon Musk announced last May that he was naming Linda Yaccarino the CEO of the company that I will always call Twitter, few people outside of the media business had any idea who she was. By now, just a few months later, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal has become a lightning rod for rage arising from Musk’s erratic, impulsive and, in many cases, repulsive behavior, even as he has made it all but impossible for her to fulfill the mission of making Twitter an alluring place for advertisers. Through it all, Yaccarino has generally presented herself as oblivious to Musk’s conduct and its impact on the company that she at least nominally leads — behavior so maddening that she has been dragged on the very platform she…

The voice is unmistakable. As the video of a woman wading into the ocean during sunset played, a melodic tune was overlaid: “I woke up, woke up, woke up in a sunshine stattte, that’s livin’ up to me.” The voice was clearly that of T-Pain, including his signature Auto-Tune eccentricities. The catch? The lyrics — and T-Pain’s singing voice itself — were created by generative artificial intelligence tech called “Dream Track” from YouTube. The AI wrote the song and re-created T-Pain’s voice so that a user could include it as a personal soundtrack to a video. YouTube also has signed John Legend, Demi Lovato and Charlie Puth, among others, for its Dream Track tech. Facebook and Instagram owner Meta has beta-launched a cast of AI “characters,” all of which share…

Land of Milk and Honey (RIVERHEAD BOOKS, SEPT. 26) BY C Pam Zhang AGENCY The Clegg Agency Zhang’s debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, was an award-winning epic about the American gold rush that used historical fiction and Chinese symbolism. Her sophomore work, more accessible but just as lyrical, deals with food and climate change and follows a chef who abandons a failing career in an equally dwindling city to pursue a new job cooking for one-percenters at a remote escape. Zhang takes a prescient, if dreary, topic — the publisher describes it as “the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world” — and imbues it with life.…

Sam Esmail is baffled by the desire for adaptations to be faithful to their source material. “That’s not the point,” says the man who brought us Mr. Robot and Homecoming. “The point is, you’re making a great film, and if you’re handcuffing yourself to the source material, you’re going to get into a lot of trouble.” With Leave the World Behind, Esmail says he was eager to adapt Rumaan Alam’s examination of class and race relations because he knew he could tell a different version of the story for film. He immediately enlisted frequent collaborator Julia Roberts, who stars opposite Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali in what is, spoilers aside, a tale of two families as they fight for survival amid an inexplicable blackout. Netflix jumped aboard the apocalyptic thriller…

When cinematographer Eigil Bryld paired with director Alexander Payne on Focus Features’ Nov. 10 release The Holdovers, which is set at a New England boarding school in 1970, one of the first things the Sideways helmer emphasized was that he didn’t want it to “just look like a movie set the ’70s.” The DP clarifies, “He really wanted it to look and feel and sound like it was a movie that was actually made in the ’70s.” The Holdovers follows a curmudgeonly high school history teacher named Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) who reluctantly remains on campus at the fictional boarding school Barton Academy during Christmas break. He forms unlikely bonds with a damaged but brainy student, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, in his feature debut), and the school’s grieving head cook,…

When the gates swing open to Austin’s 7744 Ranch, you drive into a beatific grove of oak and elm trees dotted with hipster playground features like a cold plunge, sauna and oversized game boards. Then you come to the main attractions: mammoth two-story recreation vehicles, each about 1,200 square feet. This is a 10-acre glamping park, but with a twist: Each of the five trailers, some of the largest RVs in the world, were previously owned by a major celebrity, from Jennifer Lopez and Will Smith to Simon Cowell. Owners Ron and Natalie Anderson come from a long history of renting buses and trailers to the rich and famous, having run Rock & Roll Buses during the 1980s and ’90s. Then celebrities began contracting them to build custom trailers to…

In France, cinema is known as the “seventh art” (the other six being painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture and photography). Tran Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things, the country’s 2024 Oscar entry for international feature, makes a powerful argument that gastronomy should be No. 8. The film, which won the Vietnam-born, Paris-based Hùng the best director honor in Cannes this year and is getting a limited domestic release Dec. 13, is a mouth-watering visual feast of sizzling meat, melting butter and fluffy, light-as-air puff pastries — all prepared for the camera by Pierre Gagnaire and Michel Nave, a pair of Michelin three-star chefs who acted as gastronomic manager and culinary adviser, respectively, to Hùng on the set. “Hùng wanted us to have the real gastronomical experience of tasting the food…

With dual strikes reverberating through the entertainment ecosystem — and actor and writer deals off-limits for much of 2023 — Hollywood dealmaking has been more challenging than ever. Still, there were multiple billion-dollar mergers, a flurry of acquisitions by representation and content companies, and opportunities for talent in podcasting and endorsements. Meet the lawyers, bankers, reps and execs who negotiated some of the year’s most interesting and multi-figured pacts. M&A’s Heavy Muscle Sky-high interest rates, geopolitical instability, recession anxiety and heightened scrutiny from federal antitrust enforcers have made this a choppy year for corporate dealmaking. Against this backdrop, the first half of 2023 saw a notable drop-off in premerger filings compared to 2021 and 2022, when M&A activity reached record levels. The year was anchored by some major megadeals, including Microsoft’s…

The pressure is on for the December box office after an unusual Thanksgiving feast. An epic historical drama catering to older adults and running nearly two hours and 40 minutes fed more moviegoers than a new family offering from Disney’s animation empire, which for years dominated the November holiday. (Remember that little blockbuster called Frozen?) Heading into Thanksgiving, Disney’s original music-infused Wish — an ode to Walt Disney’s trademark “wish upon a star” mantra — was widely expected to be the peak performer with a projected North American debut of $45 million to $50 million for the Nov. 22-26 corridor. Instead, it became the latest misfire from Hollywood’s once-invincible film empire, opening to a tepid $31.6 million. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the French military commander, narrowly conquered…

For characters in the Scream movies, it’s wise never to answer the phone — lest Ghostface be on the other end of the line. But after a tumultuous few months for the franchise, Scream studio Spyglass is likely hoping its calls will indeed go answered as it attempts to keep its next installment from getting the ax amid a major casting shakeup and subsequent creative pivot. On Nov. 21, it broke that Spyglass had fired Melissa Barrera from the upcoming seventh Scream movie over social media posts that company decision-makers characterized as antisemitic. Sources note the firing actually came a month earlier, in the early weeks of the Israel-Hamas war, when Barrera had become increasingly vocal. Before her firing, sources say her deal to return as Sam Carpenter, the lead…

Is Fran Drescher the Next Ronald Reagan or Another RFK Jr.? In a Nov. 9 post-strike interview with THR, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher discussed her career plans. The actress, who in September was elected to another two-year term at the helm of the union, recalled that after the announced deal with the studios, “Meryl Streep said to me, ‘This is great, now go run for [U.S.] president.’” In response, Drescher sent mixed messages, noting both that “I don’t want that job” and “I do think that we’ll see. Time will tell.” The notion’s not outlandish. After all, B-movie actor turned 40th U.S. president Ronald Reagan was the head of SAG during its last strike, in 1960. Drescher’s not new to policy discussions. Her advocacy work on behalf of her organization…

Best Bet The Quick Pitch Jason Neroni, the chef who first made an L.A. name for himself at Osteria La Buca before becoming a cornerstone of the Venice culinary scene with Superba Snack Bar and The Rose, has installed a Cal-Italian concept in Roy Choi’s former A-frame in neighboring Culver City. He’s doing Sicilian-style, cast-iron baked focaccia and the pastas he’s known for, but the point of the place is the woodfired pizzas, which meld New York with Neopolitan characteristics. 12565 West Washington Blvd.…

Catherine Marks had just graduated with her master’s degree in architecture, but before launching that career she wanted to take a stab at another passion: music. So the Australian took off for six months, moved to London and got a job at a recording studio. “I started making tea there,” she says with a light laugh. Fast-forward nearly 20 years, and it’s clear Marks made the right decision. She trained and worked alongside Grammy-winning creatives Flood and Alan Moulder, and went on to work with Alanis Morissette, St. Vincent, The Killers, Wolf Alice, The Wombats, Foals and more. This year she’s been nominated for three Grammys, thanks to her work on the record, the highly regarded debut album by boygenius (the ironically named indie supergroup consisting of Julien Baker, Phoebe…

Peter Sarsgaard’s role in Memory leans heavy, at least on paper. The actor plays Saul, a man struggling to come to terms with his early onset dementia. He meets a former classmate, played by Jessica Chastain, who is struggling herself — she was raped by older boys as a child and is 13 years into sobriety when the movie begins. But Sarsgaard, who was most recently seen in The Batman and Dopesick (as well as wife Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter), says he felt no weight. “I felt that I had to get this part, and once I had it, I was excited to do it,” he tells THR. “This movie is not violent, it doesn’t hinge on brutality, and yet it’s highly entertaining — that is a…

On Dec. 1, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé will open in thousands of theaters nationwide, capturing the era-defining artist at the peak of her creative powers. The movie, which was shot during her soldout Renaissance tour, is tracking for a domestic opening in the $17 million to $23 million range. But this isn’t Beyoncé’s first foray into film. The pop star made her feature debut in 2001 starring opposite Mekhi Phifer in Robert Townsend’s Carmen: A Hip Hopera, playing the man-eating actress Carmen. A year later, she tried her hand at comedy in Austin Powers in Goldmember, playing Austin’s sidekick Foxxy Cleopatra. But it was Dreamgirls that cemented Beyoncé’s reputation as a bigscreen star. The DreamWorks adaptation of 1981’s Tony-winning Broadway musical traces the history of a Motown supergroup called…

2023 THANKSGIVING LEADERS The five-day frame was up a hefty 41 percent from last year but still trailed pre-pandemic times (revenue was down 34 percent from 2019). TOP THANKSGIVINGS OF ALL TIME The holiday, typically a top box office driver, hasn’t yet recovered from its pandemic-era lows since hitting a high in 2018, led by Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet and MGM’s Creed II. NORMALLY, THIS IS DISNEY’S HOLIDAY Wish’s struggles are all the more apparent given that past Disney animated titles are among the 10 biggest Thanksgiving pics of all time. Source: Comscore…

There was a time when any great international actor tended to be reduced to their perceived Hollywood counterpart whenever they were discussed in the U.S. press. Under this outmoded prerogative, Korean screen icon Song Kang-ho easily could be described as his country’s simultaneous answer to both Marlon Brando and Tom Hanks, such is his seemingly contradictory blend of sardonic physicality, fearsome technique, lyrical humanism and overwhelming likability. Today, thankfully, it is sufficient to simply describe Song Kang-ho as Song Kang-ho: “One of the protean greats of world cinema — a master, end of,” as Tilda Swinton, a co-star with Song in Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), once summed him up in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. For global movie buffs, arguably one of the most exciting stories of the…

Adam Sandler joined daughters Sunny and Sadie and wife Jackie on Nov. 19 at the Los Angeles premiere of Netflix’s animated movie Leo, in which all four family members voice characters. Sandler, who also co-wrote and produced the project, told THR he was inspired to do a version of “Grease for the last year of elementary school.” He worked with writer-director Robert Smigel to craft a musical comedy focused on 70-year-old lizard Leo, who for decades has served as a class pet for a rotating group of fifth graders. When it came to creating the voice, Sandler revealed that he channeled late manager and producer Bernie Brillstein, who helped launch Saturday Night Live and served as manager to SNL stars, including himself. “Adam said, ‘Let me do Bernie for this…

The International Documentary Association (IDA), Cinema Eye Honors and Gotham Awards have delivered their verdicts on the top feature docs of the year. And, for the streamers, it’s a grim result. Absent from the Gothams’ doc feature selections, the Cinema Eye’s top feature and director noms and the IDA’s 17-title shortlist are titles from Netflix, Prime Video and Apple TV+. The lists read, in the words of one leading awards publicist, “like a giant fuck-you to Netflix.” And with Oscar campaigning in high gear, they pose the question: Is a streamer backlash brewing? The Gotham noms are mostly non-U.S. productions, including Kino Lorber’s Four Daughters, PBS’ 20 Days in Mariupol and Cinema Guild’s Our Body. Likewise, the IDA’s shortlisted titles included Morocco’s The Mother of All Lies, Colombia’s Anhell69, South…

BAR MONETTE Chef Sean MacDonald’s tapas bar, which bowed in April, serves up pizza and small plates in a beautifully lighted, emerald-walled space. In January, MacDonald plans to open a burger spot, Burgette, next door. 109 Santa Monica Blvd. THE GEORGIAN ROOM Located in the gorgeously renovated art deco-era Georgian Hotel, the Georgian Room (in the space that was once a basement speakeasy called the Red Griffin) is an intimate, 65-seat Italian steakhouse. Developers Jon Blanchard and Nicolo Rusconi of BLVD worked from vintage photographs to restore the space, which features black leather booths and red velvet curtains. 1415 Ocean Ave. THE SURFING FOX Just a bagel’s toss from the Santa Monica Pier, this all-day restaurant serves breakfast plus a main menu that includes hamachi ceviche, Santa Monica Farmer’s Market…

In her new single, “Cobra,” Megan Thee Stallion articulates a familiar condition for Black women rappers: “Breaking down and I had the whole world watchin’ / But the worst part is really who watched me?” The artist is referring to how she felt — famous but lonely, simultaneously scrutinized and disregarded — after another rapper, Tory Lanez, shot her in 2020. A trial thrust Megan Thee Stallion into the spotlight, where an unforgiving public tore apart her testimony and questioned her character. A judge sentenced Lanez to 10 years in prison, but Megan Thee Stallion’s experience highlights a tension faced by many Black women in hip-hop: They may no longer be ignored, but are they truly seen? Hip-hop turned 50 this year, a glorious milestone for a movement born on…

Red Sea Film Festival Nov. 30-Dec. 9 Jeddah Back in early 2020, a low-budget debut feature from a pair of rising Saudi Arabian filmmakers was set to enjoy the illustrious honor of opening the inaugural edition of their country’s first major international film festival. The Red Sea Film Festival, on the coastal city of Jeddah, was due to land about two years after the country lifted a 35-year ban on cinemas and would help highlight the meteoric rise of its creative sector since. Then the pandemic struck. The fest, which had been set to open March 12, 2020, proved to be one of the very first casualties of COVID-19 and wouldn’t launch until November the following year. By then, the film in question — The Book of Sun, directed by…