Innholdsfortegnelse for 6/1/2022 i Variety

I originally had intended to write this week’s Editor’s Letter about the controversial trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and how it infuriates me that the case has become a sickening spectacle of memes, audio recordings and video clips that trend on TikTok, and is the butt of mean-spirited jokes largely aimed at Heard. It sickens me that people have lost sight of what is at the heart of this case: potential domestic violence — a dangerous issue that should not be made light of under any circumstances. Violence, of course, is evil in any form, and when the horrific news of the massacre in a Texas elementary school erupted this week, I felt compelled to devote this space to the memory of the 19 children and two teachers…

Not even the pandemic was going to stop “Music Man” Tony Award nominee Hugh Jackman from mastering the tap and dance routine for the show’s Broadway revival. Jackman kept training with choreographer Warren Carlyle as the health crisis delayed the musical’s opening from fall 2020 to May 2021 to its eventual bow in February. Carlyle, who first worked with the star on the 1998 stage production of “Oklahoma!,” received a Tony nomination for his “Music Man” choreography, which took three years to fine-tune. In a musical filled with show-stopping moments, one standout is “76 Trombones.” Early in the show, Jackman’s Harold Hill must convince the people of River City, Iowa, that they need a boy’s band. He tells them about the time he saw a marching band with 76 trombones…

Happy Pride Month! From concert stages and parades to film screenings and premieres, queer celebrations are here, there and everywhere. June 1 Wednesday • Gottmik x Violet Chachki perform at the premiere of the docuseries “The Book of Queer.” Heart WeHo, West Hollywood June 2 Thursday • Joel Kim Booster, Bowen Yang, Matt Rogers, Conrad Ricamora, Tomás Matos, Torian Miller, James Scully, Nick Adams, Zane Phillips and director Andrew Ahn walk the red carpet at the premiere of “Fire Island” on opening night of NewFest Pride. SVA Theatre, New York June 3 Friday • Devin Way, Fin Argus, Jesse James Keitel, CG, Johnny Sibilly and Ryan O’Connell attend the premiere of the reimagined “Queer as Folk” with creatives Stephen Dunn and Jaclyn Moore. The evening kicks off the four-day Out-fronts.…

Marina Cappi read all the signs: film and series production in Massachusetts was increasing, lawmakers extended the state’s very attractive production credit and there was a desperate need for soundstage space. To commercial real estate veteran Cappi, building a soundstage and studio campus made good business sense. Marina Studios — the only dedicated soundstage near Boston — opened in 2021 in Quincy, Mass.’ Marina Bay, offering over 26,000 square-feet of space just a 12-minute drive from Logan Intl. Airport. The Marina Studios campus also includes 15,000 square-feet of multi-use production office and a 3-acre backlot. There’s also new housing nearby that offers shortterm leases, restaurants, markets and other amenities. Marina Studios is already booked through 2026, and the fact that Massachusetts made the generous tax credits permanent — a tax…

Think of Massachusetts as Hollywood Northeast. The state’s scenic, urban and historic settings suit all genres and appeal to filmmakers looking for authenticity, from the choppy waters of Martha’s Vineyard, where Bruce the shark terrorized beachgoers in the blockbuster thriller “Jaws,” to downtown Boston’s office buildings, where Ryan Reynolds’ “Free Guy” transformed the streetscapes. “Film tourism is a happy benefit of productions,” says John Alzapiedi, assistant director of the Massachusetts Film Office. Although the film office does not track film tourism per se, and visitors may not initially consider the Bay state primarily as a film tourism destination — in comparison to production hubs like Los Angeles, New York or London — there are enough popular films and the long-running “Cheers” sitcom to draw attention. The Bull & Finch bar…

As part of Paramount+’s “The Offer,” makeup designer Katy Fray had to recreate looks from “The Godfather.” That meant transforming Justin Chambers and Giovanni Ribisi into Marlon Brando and Joe Colombo, respectively. Ribisi gained 30 pounds to play the part of crime boss Colombo. In addition to a few prosthetic pieces, Fray took to shaving back his hair to create a receding bald comb-over. He then added a little hairpiece to the top of his head to create a thinning look. Fray says she and Ribisi “had to convince” director Dexter Fletcher that it was the right move. “Once it’s been taken off, it’s gone,” she says. Brylcreem was her go-to hair product to keep the hair in place, and makeup for him was minimal. On the other hand, the…

Cinematographer George Steel laid out a color map for Barry Levinson’s “The Survivor,” the HBO movie based on a true story that follows Harry Haft (Ben Foster), an Auschwitz survivor who is forced by the Nazis to box other prisoners. In 1953, he made headlines going up against Rocky Marciano. To tell the story, the film traced three different time periods. “We shot the camps in black and white,” Steel says. “The post-war world was shot in a desaturated color palette with more color returning to the image as we reach the ’60s.” The most challenging aspect was settling on which palette to shoot the camp in, with Steel trying numerous tests. “We had experimented with doing this in reverse, but the camp footage was too disturbing in color,” he…

As the Marvel Cinematic Universe has expanded into television, its musical reach has also grown, embracing diversity both in terms of its composers and the music they make. English composer Natalie Holt brought unexpected sonorities to “Loki”; Cairo-based Hesham Nazih added specific Egyptian sounds to “Moon Knight”; and American composer Laura Karpman employed a traditional orchestra and choir on the animated “What If…?” Loki “is sort of a likable baddie,” says Holt, “a grand, Machiavellian, Shakespearean character, so I wanted some kind of gravitas, classical weight, to his theme.” Yet, in last summer’s six-part series, the Norse god of mischief (Tom Hiddleston) is also playing with time, which suggested more unusual sounds: the wailing of a theremin and its equally eerie French cousin, the ondes Martenot. “I’d been listening to…

Science fiction has been the springboard for musical flights of fancy as long as TV and movies have been around. And this year there have been multiple examples of composers rising to the occasion for ambitious multi-part television series, including “Severance,” “Foundation,” “The Book of Boba Fett” and “Halo.” “Severance” is a rare TV project for Theodore Shapiro, a composer better known for his features (“The Devil Wears Prada”). Ben Stiller, who directed six of the nine episodes, relies on Shapiro for his film scores (“Tropic Thunder,” “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”) and sought him out for this psychological thriller about a mysterious corporation whose workers undergo a medical procedure that ensures their work lives and home lives remain completely separate. “As soon as I started reading scripts, I…

It’s been 50 years since the Watergate scandalbroke — but thanks to today’s television landscape, it’s still part of the conversation. With a dozen films and TV shows made about the political scandal, writer Robbie Pickering set out to tell a different story with Starz’s “Gaslit” — the one of Martha Mitchell, the wife of Richard Nixon’s attorney general John N. Mitchell and the first person to publicly speak out about the former president’s role in Watergate. But heading into the topic was a heavy lift. Pickering, who is part of Variety’s Virtual TV Fest taking place June 7-9, has been obsessed with the topic for years — even more so when he listened to Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast. Still, he felt there was still something new to tell. “I…

TV REVIEW Drama: FX (six episodes; all reviewed); May 31 Starring: Toby Wallace, Jacob Slater, Anson Boon, Christian Lees, Louis Partridge Some of the most exciting filmmaking in “Pistol,” FX’s new Danny Boyle-directed limited series, happens onstage. In concert scenes featuring the Sex Pistols — the real-life punk pathbreakers at the center of this story — the camera toggles between performer and spectator, moving so rapidly that it seems to eliminate the distance between the two. Director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle captures both staging in the foreground and expressive moshing in the background. The writhing performance seems less to spark violence in the audience than to run parallel to it, another expression of the free-floating anger in the air. It’s a canny way of depicting the Pistols’ appeal: The…

Don’t call it a comeback. But thanks to sports, ever-expanding drama franchises and a handful of new hits, the Big 4 broadcast networks managed to avoid another year-to-year collapse during the now-concluded TV season. Football once again ruled primetime, led by NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” while “Thursday Night Football” showed up twice on Nielsen’s top-rated series’ chart due to a quirk of some games airing only on NFL Network, and others simulcast on both Fox and NFL. (This won’t be an issue next year, as “Thursday Night Football” moves to Amazon Prime Video — and off this chart.) But beyond that, network TV’s embrace of procedural dramas is giving broadcasters a fighting chance at survival. Dick Wolf is keeping the lights on at NBC and CBS, as the hitmaker’s “Law…

AWARDS CIRCUIT Obsessing over needle drops on buzzy shows has become a fun pastime in the era of peak TV. But music supervisor Jen Malone, whose credits include “Euphoria,” “The Offer,” “Atlanta,” “Yellow-jackets” and many other series, warns us not to forget our TV history. “Music has always been a part of the storytelling process,” she points out. Even in the broadcast era. We may not remember these moments because, in many cases, songs that aired on TV episodes then were cleared for one-time use and stripped out of repeats. Sadly, I was too young to remember “WKRP in Cincinnati” during its original CBS run, but I will never forget the tearful scene where the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” played on ABC’s “The Wonder Years” in 1991 or Billy…

Angel Olsen’s new album, “Big Time,” is the kind of rare, generation-spanning album that you could give to your sister, your aunt or your grandparents. Its 10 soulful, country-inflected songs recall everything from Dusty Springfield’s 1969 masterpiece, “Dusty in Memphis,” to Shelby Lynne’s 2001 Grammy-winning “I am Shelby Lynne,” from Tammy Wynette to Lucinda Williams — and at the center of it all are Olsen’s soaring songs and crystalline, versatile voice. It’s also a memoir of coming out, of the pandemic and of mourning her parents (who died within months of each other in 2021), without explicitly being about any of those things. Like most working musicians, Olsen saw her thriving career screech to a halt in March 2020, after nearly a decade of constant touring and five increasingly critically…

It was the late 1990s and future Oscar-winning “CODA” filmmaker Siân Heder was ambling across Harvard Square, close to the home in which she grew up in Cambridge, Mass. There, near the Au Bon Pain sandwich shop on Brattle Street, Heder spotted two buddies from Cambridge Ringe and Latin School, then-unknowns Ben and Casey Affleck, shooting a scene for “Good Will Hunting,” the 1997 film that would score two Academy Awards, help usher in the era of Big Screen Boston and turn the Affleck brothers and Matt Damon, all actors in the movie and Massachusetts natives (“Massholes” in the local vernacular), into giant Hollywood stars. “I knew Ben and Casey from high school — their mom was my teacher in third and fifth grade,” Heder says. “I think I shouted…

Let’s face it: Massachusetts is not well-known for its post-production facilities. While there are a few impressive Bostonbased companies — including Soundtrack Group for ADR/sound, EditBar for editing, Color Refinery for color and Brickyard VFX for effects — their efforts are mainly focused on commercials projects. Most features and series that film in the state head elsewhere for post. But that’s starting to change, thanks in large part to state tax incentives becoming permanent last year, and companies including Zero VFX emerging as leaders in New England. “When we started in 2010, people would look at you very strangely if you said, ‘We’re doing our effects in Boston,’ because there wasn’t a ton of talent here,” says Zero VFX co-founder Brian Drewes. “The incentive has really started allowing us to…

Netflix’s “Squid Game” featured sets such as the M.C. Escherlike staircase and a tug-of-war area, as characters on a remote island compete in deadly versions of childhood games. Production designer Chae Kyoung-sun built killer sets on a large scale for the 456 contestants as they battle it out to be the last man standing, all for a cash prize. Its most iconic set is right at the beginning, as the contestants play Red Light, Green Light. “I wanted to fill the set for the first game with fantasy and fairy-tale-like images,” Chae says. “The robot doll was designed after [1970s Korean textbook characters] Chul-soo and Young-hee, and an ominous tree was put in as an object. This juxtaposition evokes both the memories of childhood and the sense of fear at…

In the Apple TV+ series “Invasion,” mankind is faced with an alien attack. But instead of an invasion, the show looks at the psychological aspect and follows five characters around the world. Visual effects were still needed even if the series focused on the trauma aspect. VFX supervisor Erik Henry says the team delivered more than 1,440 shots for the first season, which included an astronaut sequence, creating an alien race and their ships. But due to COVID, one sequence almost didn’t happen — until VFX stepped in. In one episode, Hinata, played by Rinko Kikuchi, wakes up in her spacesuit surrounded by what appears to be deep space. She hears something indistinguishable, but in space, how is that possible? She struggles to see where the sound is coming from…

Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy” takes audiences back to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll in 1990s Los Angeles. It was a pre-9/11 world, when “the internet hasn’t robbed us of our privacy,” points out production designer Ethan Tobman. “The rest of the world adores us and wants to be us. This was also a time where being famous meant you were famous, and a billion people watched ‘Baywatch’ every week.” That fame belonged to Pamela Anderson Lee (Lily James), whose star ascends as husband Tommy Lee’s (Sebastian Stan) wanes postsex tape. “This all plays out in their house,” says Tobman, who was tasked with building their world and their home. That home, a sprawling mansion, serves as a character within itself. “There’s not a strong sense of feminine identity and…

Composer Kris Bowers could find himself landing more than one Emmy nomination come July. Among his credits that could turn up as contenders are Netflix’s “Bridgerton” and “Inventing Anna”; HBO’s “Dear White People” and “Colin in Black and White,” which reunited him Ava DuVernay; and HBO Max’s “DMZ,” for which he penned an original song. For the second season of “Bridgerton,” the composer says he spent a lot of time focusing on the theme for Kate (Simone Ashley) and Anthony (Jonathan Bailey). As the characters go from enemies to lovers, Bowers knew their storyline would be “complicated, messy and devastating for somebody.” His initial version of the theme was “pretty dark” and “kind of sad,” he says. But it’s a swelling theme, and by the time the two characters kiss,…

Classical composer Nico Muhly rarely writes for TV — the BBC “Howards End” was the last one, five years ago — making his score for Apple TV+’s eighthour “Pachinko” something of an event. The century-spanning epic follows a poor Korean woman and her descendants as their lives intertwine, often unhappily, with those of their Japanese neighbors. Variety talked to Muhly about his sensitive music for the miniseries. • Why did you want to tackle this project? I’d read the book, like the majority of Americans. Soo Hugh, the showrunner, had somehow come across my instrumental music. She called me up and said, “Do you want to do this?” It was a very fast, “Yes.” • What did “Pachinko” need, musically? I noticed that you didn’t really acknowledge the Korean or…

For the first time in two years, Tribeca Film Festival is going back indoors. After canceling the 2020 edition and staying mostly outside in 2021, the annual gathering is returning to traditional premieres, panels and parties to celebrate its 21st edition. It’s also staying put in Manhattan, a change from last year’s version that spanned all five boroughs of New York City. “We’re back to normal,” says Jane Rosenthal, who founded Tribeca festival with Robert De Niro in 2002. “We are watching things together as a community.” Taking place from June 8 through June 19, Tribeca will be bookended by documentaries about Jennifer Lopez and Al Sharpton. In between, the festival has movies from directors Lena Waithe (“Aisha”), Ray Romano (“Somewhere in Queens”) and B.J. Novak (“eance”). • Was there…

The 75th annual Cannes Film Festival reminded the world just why people love going to the movies. And movie theaters received an important endorsement from a powerful A-list ally. “I make movies for the big screen,” Tom Cruise said on May 18, just hours before “Top Gun: Maverick” premiered to a rapturous standing ovation on its way to a $160.5 million domestic box office opening. Here are the biggest winners and losers from the French Riviera. • Winner: Neon. The indie distributor has a special touch with Palme d’Or winners. Following 2019’s “Parasite” and 2021’s “Titane,” Neon landed North American rights to this year’s big Cannes champ: Ruben Östlund’s black comedy “Triangle of Sadness,” which stars Woody Harrelson as a rabid Marxist who is the captain of a cruise ship…

Eric Kripke would like to make one thing clear: No sea creatures were harmed during the last season of Amazon’s extremely offbeat, Emmy-nominated superhero drama “The Boys.” The show-runner and executive producer is referring to an over-the-top scene that involved key characters smashing a motorboat into a whale. In this case, Moby Dick was actually a 50-foot long, 11-foottall prop built at great expense to ensure it was anatomically correct. Kripke raises this as a point of contrast to build anticipation for what is in store as the series returns for Season 3 on June 3, more than 18 months after the Season 2 finale dropped on Oct. 9, 2020. “There’s something that, conservatively speaking, is a thousand times crazier than the whale. And that’s just science,” Kripke tells Variety.…

Billy Porter is known for being in front of the camera — most famously as Pray Tell on “Pose” and recently giving a gender-bending twist on everyone’s favorite fairy godmother in Amazon’s musical movie “Cinderella.” Now, the Emmy-winning actor is stepping behind the camera to make his feature film directorial debut with “Anything’s Possible,” a John Hughes-esque coming-of-age dramedy about trans high school senior Kelsa (trans newcomer Eva Reign), who is navigating her first boyfriend, Khal (“Katy Keene” actor Abubakr Ali), friendship and family life with her single mom (Renée Elise Goldsberry). “I ain’t Barbra Streisand yet,” Porter tells me, laughing. “It’s like let me do one thing at a time. Let me direct something first. Then I’ll direct something and be in it too.” In “Anything’s Possible,” the spotlight…

It’s Pride Month, which means three things: Corporate Twitter accounts will start talking like “Drag Race” contestants, the queer community will continue fighting our annual blood feud about kink’s place at Pride and there will be think pieces about LGBT representation in the media. If you’re like me, the thought of those three things is enough to make your eyes glaze over. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that conversations about representation aren’t important. Letting viewers see themselves depicted in art helps people feel less alone. It tells them they’re OK. It tells them that they are worthy of story and narrative and, yeah, maybe love. And it exposes people to folks who are different than they are and makes the case that those that we don’t understand are worthy…

LISA STROUT DIRECTOR, MASSACHUSETTS FILM OFFICE a has been the director of the office since 2010. She is the former director of the New Mexico Film Office, L.A. & Boston location manager and AFCI board member. mafilm.org Massachusetts boasts everything — locations, sound stages and crew — to shoot anything from features to series to commercials. GENEROUS TAX CREDITS Massachusetts off ers a clear and competitive tax credit advantage that includes 25% payroll and production tax credits, plus a sales tax exemption. All above-the-line and below-the-line expenses qualify regardless of residency. There are no caps per year, per project, or per individual as long as 75% of principal photography is filmed in Massachusetts. Credits are refundable and transferable. The minimum spend of only $50,000 to qualify makes it highly accessible.…

Imagine a new big screen version of the infamous Boston Strangler case, filmed in … Cleveland. Or an organized crime thriller based in America’s top fishing port, New Bedford, Mass., shot on location in … Halifax. Both of these scenarios nearly happened. But thanks to passionate filmmakers and state tax credits, moviegoers will get to see a serial killer and more “CODA”-style fishermen in their natural habitat: Massachusetts. Not since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock have so many impactful visitors descended on the state. In addition to 20th Century’s “Boston Strangler” and Paramount+’s $28 million thriller “Finestkind,” two Marvel blockbusters (Disney’s “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff “Madame Web”), director-star Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro,” the Zendaya-toplined tennis drama “Challengers,” the Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna…

The second season of “Russian Doll” sees Nadia (Natasha Lyonne, who also serves as the show’s co-creator and showrunner) stepping back in time to the 1980s via a subway car. As posters of “Cats” and “Sophie’s Choice” film appear, Nadia glimpses a newspaper. The year is 1982. Not only does Nadia time travel, but she also finds herself in the body of her pregnant mother, Lenora, aka Nora, played by Chloë Sevigny. Diane Lederman stepped in as production designer, taking over from Michael Bricker, to build the ’80s world, including Lenora’s pink apartment. Lederman was inspired by a 1986 film directed by David Lynch. “The look of Season 2 is influenced by many films and auteurs of ’70s and ’80s cinema, David Lynch being an important one,” she says. “While…

Production designer Curt Beech was tasked with building the Arconia for Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” a luxurious apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with each residence an envious luxurious design reflecting its owners. Oliver Putnam (Martin Short), Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) are crime-obsessed neighbors who put that obsession to the test when a real death happens inside their building. Beech breaks down the key sets below and how each interior came together. Charles’ Living Room “The palette was built around the Paul Smith fabric we sourced for the sofa. This one swatch had everything we needed: masculinity, sophistication, playfulness and a wealth of color options for the team to work with. “We popped the orange in the kitchen, the blue in the…

Crime stories have been a TV staple dating back to the beginnings of the medium. And composers continue to find fresh ways to dramatize murder, mayhem, investigations and convictions, as demonstrated by these series from the past year: “Only Murders in the Building,” “The Thing About Pam,” “The Dropout” and “Gaslit.” Siddhartha Khosla (“This Is Us”) came up with one of the year’s catchiest themes for “Only Murders in the Building,” the Hulu comedy-mystery starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez as amateur sleuths out to solve deaths in their Manhattan apartment building. “I read the script and I heard something that felt quirky and mysterious and dramatic and emotional,” Khosla says. “It harkened back to a ’60s-ish, Donovan-like thing, and I started singing this melody over that chord…

The music branch of Emmy voters is not always impressed by big names. Take last year, when Beyoncé, Cher, H.E.R. and even Bruce Springsteen had songs in the mix for consideration Voters ignored them, shutting out superstars in favor of composers and songwriters within the world of TV. What does that mean for this year’s race? Robert Lopez and wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who were early front-runners last year and ultimately won with “WandaVision’s” “Agatha All Along,” return this time with another earworm, “You Are the Music” for Apple TV+’s animated comedy “Central Park.” Anderson-Lopez came up with the essence of the song, in which Josh Gad’s character, Birdie, is feeling threatened by Rory O’Malley’s Elwood, who he feels is going to take his job. That motif plays alongside the bigger…

Timely topics including abortion, freedom of the press, the opioid crisis and the Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy case serve as the subject matters of four documentary features premiering at this year’s Tribeca Festival. In “Battleground,” director Cynthia Lowen follows three women in charge of anti-abortion organizations, who are devoted to overturning Roe v. Wade. While the efforts of women determined to safeguard access to safe and legal abortions are also featured in the doc, Lowen felt it necessary to focus on “anti-choice actors.” “In 2019 I went down to Alabama and originally was filming with several pro-choice advocates in the state about the abortion ban,” Lowen says. “But I quickly realized that to really understand what was happening at the local clinic and state level I needed to take…

• AFTERSUN Distributor: A24 Charlotte Wells’ sensuous, sharply moving debut hinges on a remarkable duet between Paul Mescal and 11-year-old newcomer Frankie Corio as a single father and daughter revealing new, vulnerable facets of themselves to each other over the course of a tacky package vacation at the tail end of the 21st century. Among the more crisp, confident first films to emerge from the British independent scene of late, “Aftersun” confirms the sly, angular promise of Wells’ shorts, which put the Scotswoman on the map. — Guy Lodge • ARMAGEDDON TIME Distributor: Focus Features James Gray’s coming-of-age memoir movie is set in 1980 in Queens, N.Y., where Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) navigates the sixth grade and the wider world that feeds into it. It’s an effusive and exacting nostalgia…