Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 32A - November 18, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

BACK TO THE ’70S In the far corner, we can see the elevator shaft shown in the film, right next to the stage on which Billy Preston and his band perform. The massive lighting grids were used to create a ceiling of the two-story studio that was built. The vintage lights, called Mole-Richardson, are no longer in use because they’re not LED, and had to be sourced from all over the country. “IT’S SO ARCHAIC, BUT SO AMAZING” On the left of the above picture, we can see a close-up of the red Mole-Richardson light that Gonchor describes in the earlier image. Circled, there is a camera and a camera crane. Fun fact: There are only two of these Chapman cranes, developed between 1953 and 1954, that exist today, and…

On a cool fall night in October, just hours after Iran had launched rockets at targets in Israel, one of the Islamic Republic’s most famous dissidents sat a New York hotel restaurant and wondered if he’d ever get back home. Mohammad Rasoulof had made one of the most politically potent feature films about the country in years — at great risk to his life — and all he wanted was to be back in the country he hopes to change. “I walk in the U.S. or Europe and see people who are not me and ask myself: Can I belong? I want to be home,” the 51-year-old noted via a translator, a youthful dance in his eye given the ordeals he’s faced. “But it was more important to me to…

When DP Yorick Le Saux first read Steve McQueen’s script for Apple’s Blitz, which follows a boy (newcomer Elliott Heffernan) as he seeks to reunite with his mother (Saoirse Ronan) amid Germany’s bombing of London in 1940, a climactic scene set in the Underground transit system stopped him in his tracks. Heffernan’s George takes shelter in a Tube station with hundreds of other Londoners when rushing water breaks through the station’s walls. “How are we going to do that?” the DP recalls asking McQueen, adding that the water needed for the sequence, and the visual effects required, might render terribly onscreen. Alongside production designer Adam Stockhausen, Le Saux wanted to maximize the reality on set for better-looking visuals and Heffernan’s benefit. “We have a kid who has never acted before,”…

With its ’70s-era production details and sprawling age-spanning ensemble, Saturday Night has high hopes for the Oscars this year. But if the Jason Reitman period piece manages to win one, it will achieve something that the cast it depicts never could. Though Saturday Night Live has racked up a record-breaking 103 Emmys and churned out generational talent with regularity over its 50 seasons, only six among its more than 150 castmembers have ever been nominated for an Oscar (five if you don’t include one-episode-and-done player Laurie Metcalf). Its only winner? Robert Downey Jr., just this past March for Oppenheimer. And his 1985-86 SNL stint is a career footnote. “I don’t think it’s conscious,” says Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger, an Oscar prognosticator and author of 50 Oscar Nights, “but…

In the summer of 2023, Elton John did something unimaginable: He stopped touring. He had performed at least 90 shows annually for so many years over the past half-century. Yet with the close of his five-year Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour that July, that stage of life was ending. “I’m 77 years of age. I’ve done all there is to do. I’ve succeeded. I’ve been there. I’ve done it,” he recalled of his decision when speaking Oct. 1 at the New York Film Festival. “I’m still going to make records. I’m still going to have music in my life. But the most important thing in my life [is husband] David, [adolescent sons] Zachary and Elijah, and my family and my friends.” The end of his touring career was a big…

September 5, which bows in limited release Nov. 29, recreates the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis — a dark affair that resulted in the death of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, their five captors from the Palestinian terrorist group Black September and a police officer. The Paramount film is told from the perspective of the ABC Sports team stationed in the West German city to cover the Games (Peter Sarsgaard portrays ABC Sports president Roone Arledge). The crisis and its aftermath have been dramatized before. In Sword of Gideon, a 1986 Canadian telefilm, Steven Bauer plays a Mossad agent who hunts down the Black September plotters at the direction of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Colleen Dewhurst). That film was based on the 1984 book Vengeance by George Jones —…

“Raging Bull was so extraordinary. It was deserving of every single prize that year.” (Martin Scorsese’s gritty boxing classic was nominated for eight Oscars, tied for the most that season, but won only two, for editing and best actor.)…

With Maria, Chilean director Pablo Larraín closes out his trilogy of iconic 20th century women, following Jackie (about Jacqueline Kennedy) and Spencer (Princess Diana). But the director says that he never planned for these to be a group of films, even though they ended up being connected in more ways than one. “I never thought that I would do three of them — I never had a master plan of any kind,” Larraín, whose other credits include No, Neruda and El Conde, tells THR. “They all have a number of things in common: All three of them are stories about women who were in the heart of very interesting historical moments. They were women who were related to strong families — or men, if you like — and in those…

There’s a moment in the middle of I Am: Celine Dion that will give even the most hardened documentary fan pause. Dion is on a massage table when she suffers a medical episode. For seemingly minutes on end, we watch her undergo a seizure that makes the simple act of moving nearly impossible. Dion’s staff tries desperately to get her comfortable while we watch her face in extreme close-up. In real life, the episode would last 40 minutes, one of Dion’s longest spasms stemming from Stiff Person Syndrome, the rare neurological condition she announced she was afflicted with in 2022. “Everyone in the room was collectively sitting there, kind of waiting to see what happens to Celine Dion as she has no control over her own body,” recalls cinematographer Nick…