Innholdsfortegnelse for May 10, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

Even before thousands of Hollywood writers went on strike May 2, their union sent out a lengthy list of prohibited activities during a work stoppage. Writing, pitching, revising, negotiating — all forbidden, according to the WGA. Taking meetings or responding to notes? Forget about it. And “For Your Consideration” or film festival promotion are no-gos. What can the WGA’s 11,500 or so film and TV writers actually do during the strike? The short answer: not much when it comes to writing for the screen. Notably, writers can still pen spec scripts, or a script that has not been commissioned, according to guild rules. Once it’s written, though, “neither you nor your reps can shop, option or sell the spec script.” Once the strike is over, writers with spec scripts on…

TROY AIKMAN Analyst, ESPN’s Monday Night Football The Hall of Fame quarterback traded his helmet for a suit after retiring. He moved to ESPN last season after 21 years with Fox. TOM BRADY Future analyst, Fox Sports The NFL GOAT officially retired in February after 23 seasons and says he’ll join Fox’s Sunday afternoon broadcast booth in 2024. NATE BURLESON Co-host, CBS Mornings and The NFL Today A onetime wide receiver for the Vikings, Seahawks and Lions, he made the jump to TV on the NFL Network in 2014. CRIS COLLINSWORTH Analyst, NBC’s Sunday Night Football Since 2009, the former Bengals receiver has been the lead analyst for the NFL’s Sunday night game, the sport’s highest-profile perch. MICHAEL STRAHAN Co-host, GMA, analyst for Fox NFL Sunday A Hall of Famer…

It was in August 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that Lily Gladstone — who had earned raves playing a lovelorn rancher in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie Certain Women — started to consider a career change. “You just wonder if it’s going to be sustainable,” Gladstone, 36, recalls thinking during that professional dry spell. “So I had my credit card out, registering for a data analytics course.” A self-professed “bee nerd,” she planned to apply for seasonal work with the Department of Agriculture tracking murder hornets — yes, murder hornets — that were wreaking havoc around the country at the time. But as she entered her credit card information, a Gmail notification alerted her to a request for a Zoom meeting with Martin Scorsese. The murder hornets would…

When you walk through the doors of the newly renovated Carlton Hotel, what first hits you is the light — the light and the space. The cramped lobby of the old Carlton, with its low ceiling and narrow corridor between check-in desk and concierge, has given way to a vast open area, brightly lit by the Mediterranean sun streaming in through the banks of south-facing windows. The ceiling looks miles away. Cannes-born interior designer Tristan Auer, famed for his restoration of the Hotel de Crillon in Paris and the redesign of the London Four Seasons, has gutted the entrance area, ripping out mid-century “improvements” to reveal the original high-vaulted design from 1911 by Carlton architect Charles Dalmas in all its belle epoque glory. Decades-old layers of paint slathered on the…

Efforts to decarbonize the film industry are picking up pace in Europe, where environmentalist-minded producers are using the levers of state funding to help the business go green. As one of the first state film and TV bodies to attach ecological stipulations to its funding, France is among those countries leading the charge. Effective March 31 of this year, producers of projects across all genres and formats who are applying for funds from the CNC — the National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image — have to include provisional and final carbon audits for their productions that assess their environmental impact. Starting Jan. 1, carbon audits will be mandatory: Any application without one will be rejected, and funding might be linked to certain environmental obligations. The size and reach…

The Tuscan seaside town of Forte dei Marmi became a tourist hotspot in Italy’s dolce vita heyday. Ferocious local zoning laws, and a preference for discretion among the wealthy who vacation there, have kept it largely unchanged since the Agnelli family and other wealthy Milanese turned it into Italy’s answer to the Hamptons. And though it’s a favorite of Miuccia Prada, Giorgio Armani and Andrea Bocelli, all of whom have homes there, Forte’s elegance is low-key — bicycle, not smoky-windowed Escalade, is the default way to get around. What first lured visitors was the beaches, which are wide, golden and miles-long, far more appealing than the pebbly patches that dot the Amalfi Coast, for example — no wonder Naomi Campbell and Zoe Saldaña have been spotted in Forte dei Marmi.…

The new FX-produced drama Class of ’09 is a puzzlement. One of those Hulu-only offerings, it certainly has the prestige trappings of an FX show, from its cinematic production values to a cast topped by FX vets Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta) and Kate Mara (A Teacher) to creator Tom Rob Smith (London Spy, The Assassination of Gianni Versace). But it feels like a broadcast TV show from a decade ago — specifically, like ABC’s Quantico, a drama remembered largely by Priyanka Chopra Jonas devotees. Although the series scores a small dose of relevance from its treatment of AI-driven law enforcement, even that feels like a remnant from an assortment of broadcast failures rather than something creatively urgent. In 2009 — “The Past” — we meet the new prospective agents at…

In London’s young, bustling creative neighborhood of Shoreditch, just around the corner from Tinder’s huge, boldly colored billboards advertising that it all “starts with a swipe,” sits the company responsible for making the dating app’s most notorious swiper globally famous. Raw, the production banner that now occupies more than three busy floors of an otherwise unremarkable office block, had produced numerous hits before The Tinder Swindler dropped on Netflix in February 2022. But the feature documentary — unraveling the shocking story of jet-setting scammer Simon Leviev and how the women he charmed (then conned out of millions) would eventually bring down his fast-living Ponzi scheme — landed like little else. Audiences racked up 166 million hours of viewing time within 28 days of it hitting the streamer, making it Netflix’s…

A day after a strike was called May 1, following talks with studios led by WGA chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman breaking down, a dozen or so members of the Set Decorators Society of America gathered to share intel. Discussion of layoffs kicked off the Zoom meeting. PamElyea, owner of L.A.-based prop house History for Hire, said she had to fire her receptionist and drum technician in March in anticipation of a work stoppage. Others nodded, echoing sentiments that they could not keep all their staff in the face of what they expected to be a lengthy strike. “We’d been saving up, but every time we get something together, something happens,” Elyea says. When writers manned the picket lines 15 years ago, the fallout of the 100-day stoppage was around $2…

Show me the money,” Cuba Gooding Jr. famously tells Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. Wall Street has been pressuring Hollywood to do the same, as investors push for streaming profits amid economic headwinds. Key parts of the solution for industry players, from Disney to Amazon Studios, have been cost cuts. But while entertainment companies have been showing the door to thousands of staffers, they have also shown their top executives the money — again. In a case of bad timing, disclosures of higher (or lower, but still very healthy) CEO compensation in regulatory filings in March and April have made for a sharp contrast with layoffs and the start of the writers strike. This executive pay reporting season didn’t repeat last year’s picture of several bosses joining the very exclusive…

Jonah Hauer-King, who plays Prince Eric in Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid, went through three months of rehearsals for the part, which included learning to ride horses, work with dogs, scuba dive, row and operate a horse carriage. “I’ve never done so much training in my life,” says the 27-year-old London native, whose credits include 2019’s A Dog’s Way Home and the BBC drama World on Fire. Hauer-King first tried out for The Little Mermaid as a “fun experience,” thinking it would never go anywhere. Seven months of auditions ensued, which included an Ariel-esque moment of losing his voice the day before he was asked to sing in front of director Rob Marshall (he met with Marshall a few weeks later to try again). The actor also screen-tested alongside star…

Rounding Up the Best WGA Strike Protest Signs The Writers Guild of America called a strike after midnight on May 2, and about 12 hours later, picket lines popped up in L.A. and New York outside studios and networks’ and streamers’ headquarters. A quick survey of the scenes revealed clear (and sometimes hilarious) messages from the front lines thanks to a segment of the population not found at most protests: writers. THR rounded up a sampling: “Hey, David Zaslav, writers make you stupid rich (this was a haiku)”; “I stream, you stream, we all stream so pay us!”; “Are you not entertained? Pay writers”; “Wrote ChatGPT This”; “Pay your writers or we’ll spoil Succession”; “Studios, we have notes”; “AI came up with 10 suggestions for this sign: THEY ALL SUCKED”;…

It’s jarring how much the entertainment landscape has changed since the last writers strike: In 2007, Netflix was still primarily a DVD-by-mail business, Amazon Studios and Apple hadn’t yet crossed over from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, and streaming as we know it didn’t exist. Now there’s more content being produced than ever, with the streamers and legacy players like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery spending well into the billions each year. Once again, a strike is happening during a period of widespread economic uncertainty spurred by inflation, concerns of a recession, and mass layoffs in media and entertainment. But this time around, there’s a twist: the ascension of generative artificial intelligence. If half the internet can be tricked by an AI-created Drake and The Weeknd collab, could that same tech…

Earlier this year, Johnny Depp was given a VIP tour of AlUla (pronounced AL-yoo-lah), the historic region of Saudi Arabia being heavily touted as both a tourism and filming destination. His guide: Saudi culture minister Prince Badr (or, in full, Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan Al Saudi), a well-connected royal and governor of AlUla’s Royal Commission. “Good times,” Badr posted on Instagram alongside a photo of himself with his arm around Depp (and the actor’s many necklaces). There was good reason for Depp to accept an invitation to AlUla, joining a flood of A-listers who have been lured to the area recently as part of a multimillion-dollar marketing push. Just three days before his Jan. 16 visit, it was announced that the Red Sea Film Foundation —…

Jennifer Hackett remembers the first time she took a tender boat out to Octopus, the superyacht owned by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen that boasted two helipads and an onboard submarine and hosted one of the most exclusive parties at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2015, while vp special projects at Paradigm, where she was responsible for everything from corporate sponsorships and event planning to high-end gifting and ticketing, Hackett had signed with Allen (who died in 2018) and his Vulcan Productions to curate his Cannes experience, including film recommendations, liaising with protection teams and helping oversee Octopus’ guest list. Two years later, the Florida-raised and Vanderbilt-educated Hackett founded JNH & Co. to address a very specific niche in the entertainment industry: “The most intricate 2 to 5 percent of what…

The 1970 edition of the Cannes Film Festival was noted for giving rise to several bold new voices. Robert Altman arrived as an established (and notoriously troublesome) TV director but left a Palme d’Or winner with M*A*S*H, his launchpad to becoming one of the most pivotal figures of contemporary cinema. In the Directors’ Fortnight competition, then a year old, the German absurdist comedy Even Dwarfs Started Small gave audiences a hint of what a 20-something festival first-timer named Werner Herzog might have up his creative sleeve. Over in the Critics’ Week sidebar, a rising English director named Ken Loach also was making his Cannes debut (like Herzog with his second feature). The bespectacled 33-year-old had arrived as part of what he describes as a “rather snooty” U.K. delegation that didn’t…

Each July, the idyllic Cycladic islet of Mykonos goes to war. The victors claim sprawling, ultra-luxurious party palaces, built for sipping retsina with the world’s rich and famous. The less-privileged check in to double-bed hotel rooms. A 33-square-mile speck in the Aegean Sea, Mykonos has one of the densest inventories of luxury private villas anywhere in Greece. In the summer, its population swells from about 15,000 to over 200,000 well-heeled sun-seekers each week. Last year, Elon Musk, Nicole Scherzinger and A-list stylist Warren Alfie Baker all visited, but it’s the multitude of semi-anonymous European billionaires, Middle Eastern royals and American status-seekers who really keep the island’s villa economy afloat. Big names and big money are, of course, nothing new to the island. Long before Lindsay Lohan opened her ill-fated Beach…

You could call the 40 executives on THR’s inaugural International Women in Entertainment — Film list “the survivors.” As seismic disruptions rocked the indie world, from COVID shutdowns to the decimation of the special cinema market, these women have found a way to secure the money and the partners to keep making the stories they care about — often told by filmmakers from ignored or underrepresented groups — and get them out to the audiences that love them, worldwide. In a business that lionizes ego, these bosses — some who run pan-national mini-studios, others who oversee boutique operations with a handful of employees — have made an art out of collaboration, understanding that only by pooling their resources, by co-producing, co-financing or distributing one another’s movies, and by mentoring and…

Charlie Day’s feature directorial debut hits theaters May 12 when Roadside releases Fool’s Paradise, a satire in which he plays a man who is unable to speak but becomes an accidental Hollywood star. Day, who voices Luigi in the smash hit The Super Mario Bros. Movie, is no stranger to leading his own projects. Back when he was stuck in the audition trenches, Day met fellow aspiring actors Rob McElhenney and Glenn Howerton, and the trio realized they shared not only comedic sensibilities but also frustrations about landing roles. They started making short films at home, and these would ultimately evolve into It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which premiered on FX in August 2005 with all three as executive producers. (It moved to FXX in 2013.) “There was a real…

Could striking writers win the battle but lose the war? “The sorry news for writers is that, in declaring a strike, they may in fact be helping the streaming giants and their parent companies,” a team of SVB MoffettNathanson analysts argued in a May 3 report. The last time the sector saw production stoppages was when the pandemic hit stateside in March 2020, “the only year many of these services were able to grow free cash flow.” Free cash flow tells investors how much money a company has left after paying all of its financial obligations. If it is negative, firms must tap into cash reserves or debt. That COVID-19 halt had plenty of downsides (see: lack of product in theaters even now). But it allowed studios to rethink content…

In Focus After Paramount disclosed first-quarter earnings on May 4 packed with a string of bad news — a $511 million streaming loss, $1.67 billion in programming charges related to its Showtime-Paramount+ merger, TV unit ad sales off 11 percent — alarm bells went off for some on Wall Street while stock fell like an anvil by 28 percent to $16.40 a share. Management also slashed the firm’s quarterly dividend from 24 cents per share to 5 cents a share, which analysts calculated would save Paramount $500 million annually. The mixed results also resparked speculation about a sale for the Shari Redstone-controlled firm. The issue: Who’s buying? “While some may hope for an eventual sale of Paramount, we don’t see a potential buyer in the near-to-medium term,” wrote J.P. Morgan…

There’s a rich, storied history of independent bookstores in Southern California, from Vroman’s in Pasadena to Chevalier’s Books in Larchmont Village. Now, as some consumers tire of buying books online from faceless corporations, a new generation of community-focused shops is sprouting up throughout Los Angeles. NORTH FIGUEROA BOOKSHOP This store opened in 2022 in Highland Park, which manager Mads Gobbo describes as “a super literary neighborhood,” adding that customers “are discovering a lot of backlist titles in our shelves. L.A. classics like City of Quartz are definitely up at the top for us.” Founded by independent book publishers Tyson Cornell (Rare Bird) and Chris Heiser (Unnamed Press), the shop features a growing local-authors section of “folks directly from the neighborhood,” says Gobbo. 6040 N. Figueroa St. PALM GROVE SOCIAL Since…

In an emotional sendoff for the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, director James Gunn and stars Chris Pratt, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Pom Klementieff, Karen Gillan, Will Poulter, Maria Bakalova, Sean Gunn and Chukwudi Iwuji reunited at the world premiere of Vol. 3 on April 27 in Hollywood. “I’ve learned so much,” Gunn told THR of his time in the MCU, as he now officially parts ways for his new job at DC. “I’ve learned a lot about the process of storytelling. I’ve learned a lot about working within a connected universe. And I’ve learned a lot about working hard on films that maybe work well, or maybe don’t work so well, and trying to make them better in postproduction.” Got tips? Email rambling@thr.com…

The NFL season had been over for two months, but Brandon Copeland, a veteran linebacker who played for the Detroit Lions and New York Jets, was still in “game mode” — just not on the field. Copeland was in a broadcast booth inside the NFL’s Los Angeles media hub with CBS Sports and NBC Sports broadcaster Noah Eagle, calling a game while the sounds of a stadium crowd filled his earpiece. The game was not live, of course; it was as “realistic of a facsimile of what it’s like to do it that we can provide,” says NFL Network senior coordinating producer Chris Weerts. This test run was an opportunity for Copeland to see if a job in the broadcast booth might be in his future. “I guess the analogy…

In a scene late in Natalie Portman’s new movie, May December, she’s talking with the faintest lisp, somehow playing a moment as both fragile and predatory. Portman’s performance in the scene is striking not just for how uncomfortable it is, but because it’s an uncanny re-creation of a character that Julianne Moore has been playing for the entire movie up to that point. In the drama from director Todd Haynes, which will premiere in competition May 20 at Cannes, Portman is Elizabeth, an actress doing research to play Gracie (Moore), a woman at the center of a decades-old tabloid scandal, married to a man (Riverdale’s Charles Melton) 23 years younger than she is. May December is an opportunity for the star of dark films like Black Swan and Leon: The…

This could be the year African cinema conquers Cannes. The 76th festival has more Africa-set features in the official selection than ever, including two in competition — Four Daughters from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin) and Banel & Adama, the debut feature from Senegalese-French filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy. Then there’s Omar la Fraise, an Algerian-set Midnight Screening entry from Elias Belkeddar starring Reda Kateb and Benoît Magimel, and four Un Certain Regard titles: Moroccan films Les Meutes from Kamal Lazraq and the documentary The Mother of All Lies from Asmae El Moudir; Omen, the feature debut of Belgian-Congolese hip-hop artist Baloji; and Mohamed Kordofani’s Goodbye Julia, the first Sudanese film to screen on the Croisette. The selection ranges across genres and cinematic styles. Omar la…

The skies over Mallorca last summer were so busy that only the banking hub of Geneva bested them for private jets. So says Elliot Krauze, who runs the high-end local concierge firm Milagro. Since moving to the island from the U.K. seven years ago, he’s watched it transform from a fly-and-flop spot for package-holidaying Brits and Germans to the Mediterranean’s discreet, elite island, equal parts Sardinia and Capri. “It’s a real mixture of new and old money,” Krauze explains. “Our business is catering to all those people.” Just don’t go there for a showy getaway, cautions London-based fashion exec Daisy Hoppen, who has long had a family home in the countryside. Mallorca is upscale, chic and understated. “You don’t ever see anyone in high heels. Everyone’s in jeans and a…

The renegade B-movie spirit that has invigorated much of Robert Rodriguez’s filmography is largely missing from the soullessly slick Hypnotic, an absence heightened by an ultra-serious Ben Affleck in Guru of Glum mode. If you can get past all that, the pacy, high-concept action thriller is reasonably engrossing, albeit with a faint whiff of mothballs that betrays its 20-year-old roots. Rodriguez says he was inspired by a rerelease of Vertigo, but the result feels less like Hitchcock than ersatz Christopher Nolan. The movie screened at SXSW in March as a work-in-progress and opens in U.S. theaters May 12, ahead of its international premiere in a Midnight Screenings slot at the Cannes Film Festival. Affleck plays Detective Danny Rourke, introduced during a therapy session as he broods over the unsolved abduction…