Innholdsfortegnelse for January 10, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

Shop Talk Pharrell Williams’ vibrant debut collection for Louis Vuitton has officially landed in West Hollywood at the luxury label’s new men’s pop-up shop. Open through mid-March at 8800 Melrose Ave., the temporary boutique re-creates Paris’ oldest bridge, the Pont Neuf, where Louis Vuitton’s newly minted men’s creative director staged his Spring Summer 2024 show in June. A golden interior with street lamps and a Damier-patterned floor set the scene, but the boutique’s pièce de résistance is its Speedy bag room, which is hidden behind a giant bookshelf covered in travel guide books. The pop-up showcases Louis Vuitton’s extensive menswear offerings including accessories, jewelry, leather goods, luggage, trunks, ready-to-wear and shoes.…

If you’re a fan of animation, you know the name John Musker, whose four decades at Disney included writing and directing such classics as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Moana. Since retiring from the studio in 2018, he independently pursued an idea for a playful hand-drawn short, which he populated with caricatures of dozens of people from his life, among them fellow animators, CalArts classmates and Disney studio execs. I’m Hip — shortlisted for an Academy Award — is a charming, music video-like film featuring a cat singing the catchy title song, Dave Frishberg’s 1970s recording of a tune he wrote with Bob Dorough. “[The song’s] very witty, and I always thought that would make for a fun short,” says Musker, 70. “I have a penchant for teasing people,” he…

Hollywood has been trying to adapt Judy Blume novels almost as long as she’s been writing them (more than 50 years). The young adult author is, rather notoriously, as reluctant to sell the rights to her work as she is adept in her storytelling — by the time she finally said yes to someone, there was an almost mythological quality to the idea of a Judy Blume film. When Rachel McAdams signed on to Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, she knew all about its journey to the script stage. “I’d heard the stories of Kelly [Fremon Craig, the director] flying to Florida to meet Judy at her bookstore and court her,” McAdams says. “She kind of became our North Star as we were making this; all we really…

Not every lackluster show title reflects a lackluster show. For every tepid Suspicion, there’s a zippy Hijack, for every drab Liaison a gorgeous Foundation — and that’s just on Apple TV+. But an uninspired name can feel, in retrospect, like an early warning sign. So it does with the streamer’s Criminal Record. The thriller has assets, chief among them stars Cush Jumbo (The Good Fight) and Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who). But a tendency to prioritize themes over characters, combined with languid pacing and a too-measured tone, ultimately yields little payoff. For a while, the promise of a murder mystery with prestige TV gloss is enough to sustain interest. Jumbo plays June Lenker, a midlevel detective who comes into a tip that the killer behind a 2011 murder is still on…

Mark your calendar: On Jan. 29, Amazon will unleash what one top advertising executive calls a “tornado” that will “upend” the streaming video landscape. The company will flip a switch and turn on ads for all of its Prime Video viewers. Users will have the option to pay $3 a month to remove the ads, but as the executive quips: “Almost no one will do that, are you kidding me?” After all, people are paying Amazon for the fast shipping. Reacher and Thursday Night Football are thrown in for free. It’s a move that has marketers salivating and a few legacy media executives anxiously waiting to see what happens. The move will instantly turn Amazon into a streaming-ad juggernaut, and the largest ad-supported subscription streaming platform in the marketplace with…

DRAMA SERIES I ruled out half the nominees immediately, but this is still the strongest single category in the history of the Emmys and I agonized over the other four. I had zero interest in The Crown — I watched the first season because my wife asked me to, then I was done. You couldn’t pay me to watch House of the Dragon — I was a Game of Thrones person, but I watched 10 minutes of this and read the reviews and it just seemed like a money grab. I devoured the first season of Yellowjackets, but it jumped the shark in season two. I love Bob Odenkirk and Jonathan Banks, but there have been better seasons of Better Call Saul. I loved The White Lotus — not as…

GAME OF THRONES ENDED, AND DAVID BENIOFF AND DAN WEISS HAD TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO NEXT. The writer-producers had made the biggest TV hit of the 21st century, and the most Emmy-winning drama of all time — and it was their very first show. HBO’s Thrones had a spectacular eight-season run, a global phenomenon that was reputationally marred by a 2019 final season that fans loudly considered disappointing. In the online space, at least, Benioff and Weiss’ obsessive, day-and-night efforts to pull off a production that was unprecedented in its difficulty were shrugged aside. Psychologists call this the “peak-end rule” — how people feel about the end of something tends to color how they feel about all of it. And many fans felt raw about the end of…

When Dominic Sessa found out he had been cast in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, he was a high school senior at the prestigious boarding school Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and was in the middle of writing a paper about “Hamlet or something” for a teacher who rarely gave good grades and was “super hard to impress,” he says. It was a tiny bit of art imitating life, as Sessa had just discovered he would be playing a teen at a fictional institution not unlike Deerfield who develops a bond over one lonely Christmas with an irascible professor played by Paul Giamatti — who rarely hands out an A. Sessa never ended up finishing the paper. “I remember just slamming my laptop shut,” he recalls. It seems unlikely that Giamatti’s Paul…

There’s a whole subgenre of stories about famous detectives gone to seed. Sherlock Holmes and his proxies indeed have frequently experienced senility, drug addiction or general obsolescence over the past several decades of film and television. In the six-episode limited series Monsieur Spade, which will roll out on AMC, AMC+ and Acorn TV, the powerhouse creative duo of Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Tom Fontana (Oz) take Dashiell Hammett’s Detective Sam Spade and drop him into a bucolic retirement in the South of France. The result explores what happens to an irritable character when, after finding peace, he’s plunged into the middle of escalating crime and unrest. Of course, Sherlock Holmes is one of the most recognizable characters in cultural history, whereas Sam Spade was merely featured in The…

Chelsea Handler wants everyone to notice all the women who are dominating culture right now. The comedian, who will return to host the Critics Choice Awards for the second year in a row, has been reflecting on what 2023 has been like in the world of film and television. “It’s very demonstrative of how underserved we’ve been,” she says. “When you serve us up to be appreciated, we deliver. And we show up in droves to support that.” The ceremony, which will air live on The CW from the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, will be among the first televised shows of the 2023-24 awards season held in the wake of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes as well as global strife, about which many actors have spoken out against. “I…

Jonathan Majors is working to save his reputation and career in giving a Jan. 8 interview declaring his innocence ahead of sentencing, in a move that experts see as risky legally and professionally. The Creed III and Marvel actor was convicted by a jury in December of reckless assault in the third degree, a misdemeanor, and harassment in the second degree, which is a violation. The charges stem from an incident inside a car on March 25 in which Majors’ ex-partner Grace Jabbari testified that she saw a text on his phone suggesting he was cheating on her and grabbed it from him. She said the actor then injured her, including prying her finger from the phone and striking her head as he tried to take the phone away from…

Panic in the Big Easy: How Crime in New Orleans Upended Queer Eye’s New Season A new season of Queer Eye hits Netflix on Jan. 24, and the rollout is underway with Fab Five member Tan France recently teasing on Instagram, “Get ready, folks, this season’s a great one.” Per multiple sources, it also was pretty scary. A string of crime around the New Orleans set caused panic among staff and led producers to implement heightened security protocols during the final weeks of filming in summer 2022. The cost of increased security (including such measures as a round-the-clock detail for the stars) caused producers to trim the episode order from seven to six, a decision that sparked friction over lost pay. Things took a turn on July 2, 2022, when…

Weddings Chelsea Archer, senior photo editor at The Hollywood Reporter, married Tristan Cassel, former THR photo editor and part-time Bingo Legend at Eagle Rock Brewery, on Oct. 28 at L.A. River Studios. The couple have been together for 17 years. Congrats Sony Pictures Television Studios named Dylan Massin executive vp production and promoted Adam Moos to senior vp production and head of production operations Jan. 3. Matt Andrée Wiltens was appointed senior vp and head of global corporate communications for Gersh Agency on Jan. 4. Ed Lunger was promoted to senior vp and G.M. of Sphere on Jan. 3. Jethro Nededog joined The Lippin Group as vp on Jan. 3. Gardner Reed was upped to senior vp development at Wheelhouse Entertainment on Jan. 5. Deaths Mickey Cottrell, the Hollywood publicist,…

The last time Sean Combs’ music competed at the Grammys, a then-unknown Mark Zuckerberg had just created Facebook, Nipplegate occurred at the Super Bowl and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King garnered a record-tying 11 Oscars. It was 2004, and Combs, aka Diddy, won best rap performance by a group or duo — his third Grammy — for the thumping hit “Shake Ya Tailfeather,” featuring Nelly and Murphy Lee. The track appeared on the Bad Boys II soundtrack, which Diddy executive produced and released on his Bad Boy label. So his return to the Grammys, two decades later with a nomination for best progressive R&B album for his The Love Album: Off the Grid, is a major feat — and a proud moment for the artist.…

“The movie called on me trying to make sure that people feel heard and seen because that’s what Bayard Rustin did. His life was about being in service to others, and then history put him in the shadows.”COLMAN DOMINGO There aren’t many places where one might encounter two Avengers, three chameleons and a hot priest. But that’s precisely who gathered in mid-November for THR’s Actor Roundtable at The Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica: Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer), Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things), Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction), Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers), Colman Domingo (Rustin) and Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers). They have among them 14 Emmy nominations (five of which led to wins), six Tony nominations (one victory) and six Oscar nominations, with each still on the hunt for his first…

Contrary to all those clearly erroneous fan rumors, Christopher Nolan obviously did not detonate an atomic bomb while making the historical epic Oppenheimer. To re-create the Trinity Test — the world’s first A-bomb explosion — he and his team fired off tons of TNT, set flame to gallons of gasoline, and burned up mountains of magnesium and aluminum powder. But the 53-year-old director, famous for his preference for practical effects over computer-generated ones — this, remember, is the guy who crashed a real Boeing 747 while shooting his 2020 thriller Tenet — drew the line at nuclear fusion. “It’s gallows humor, a very dark joke,” Nolan says with a laugh about those fan rumors that he was planning on setting off an actual nuclear blast in the New Mexico desert.…

Without the family drama at its center, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction — about a disgruntled author who, in jest, writes a grossly stereotypical African American novel that achieves mass success — could be a mockumentary about Hollywood. “I thought it was one of the best scripts I’d ever read,” Sterling K. Brown says of the adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure. “It was able to make fun of an industry and also challenge it to say there are ways in which you could be better,” he says. “You are narrow in terms of Black life that you are willing to portray for mass consumption. I’m going to tell you that, and at the same time, I’m going to give you an idea of other stories that would be viable…