Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/20/2021 i Variety

“Champaign ILL” featured rising stars Sam Richardson (“Veep”) and Adam Pally (“Happy Endings”) and garnered plenty of critical acclaim when it debuted. The series came from the minds behind popular comedies “Happy Endings” and “Black Monday.” Yet you probably never heard of it. Originally produced for You-Tube Premium, the entire 10-episode season was released in 2018. But the series, about a hip-hop star’s entourage that’s forced to readjust to life without perks when the star unexpectedly dies, didn’t manage to find audiences, particularly as YouTube started exiting the scripted business. Now, “Champaign ILL” is getting a second lease on life — via a recent exclusive acquisition by Hulu, which re-premiered the series on Oct. 12. It’s the latest example of a show that fell through the cracks but then found…

Wrapping up production on “Insecure” was an emotional experience for writer and executive producer Amy Aniobi. Not only was the beloved HBO comedy ending, but world events made production even more complex. “Creating that final season in a pandemic felt like the hardest thing any of us had ever done,” Aniobi tells Variety. “It was just like pulling teeth to be funny when you’re sad, but I think we pulled it off.” Fortunately, “Insecure” feels like family — Aniobi and creator-star Issa Rae have known each other since Stanford, and Aniobi wrote on “Awkward Black Girl” — but, she notes, not every young writer has that support system, which became increasingly apparent after the murder of George Floyd. “It was such a dark time,” Aniobi recalls. “Black creatives felt particularly…

Oct. 21 • Issa Rae, Yvonne Orji and Jay Ellis walk the carpet at the season premiere of “Insecure” at L.A.’s Kenneth Hahn Park. Oct. 22 • Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh welcome guests to reopening night of “The Phantom of the Opera,” Broadway’s longest-running show, at the Majestic Theatre. Oct. 23 • Shawn Mendes, Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay, Doja Cat and Maroon 5 perform at Audacy’s We Can Survive concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Oct. 25 • Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie join their “Last Night in Soho” director Edgar Wright at the Focus Features film’s premiere at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. • Director Scott Cooper celebrates his Searchlight Pictures horror movie “Antlers” with stars Keri Russell, Jeremy T. Thomas and Graham Greene…

The fate of artists deemed problematic will be one of the talking points when noms are announced. These carry asterisks. Morgan Wallen: The country star became a household name for all the wrong reasons when a video of him uttering a racial slur during a drunken exchange with friends was made public Feb. 2. Wallen was removed from the playlists of most country radio stations for months and barred from competing or appearing on several country or mainstream awards shows — moves that did nothing to diminish the commercial success of what still stands as the most-consumed album of the year in any format — racking up more than 2.5 million album-equivalent units. The Country Music Assn. Awards has sent mixed messages: “Dangerous” is nominated for album of the year,…

Omer Fedi The Tel Aviv-born, Los Angelesbred Fedi is arguably the breakout hip-hop producer of 2021. The 21-year-old has landed three No. 1s this year with “Mood” by 24kGoldn featuring Iann Dior, Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” and The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s “Stay.” The latter two are possible contenders in marquee categories, as are Lil Nas X’s album and Machine Gun Kelly’s “Tickets for My Downfall,” both of which Fedi co-produced. Finneas The 24-year-old has won eight Grammys including the top producer (non-classical) honor in 2020. He will, no doubt, be in contention again thanks to his production on Billie Eilish’s chart-topping sophomore album “Happier Than Ever.” His work on Justin Bieber & Benny Blanco’s “Lonely” as well as two contributions to Kid Cudi’s…

The Newport Beach Film Festival is back and bigger than ever. Following 2020’s scaled-down, mostly virtual festival, this year returns to in-person screenings and events. Running Oct. 21-28, it will screen more than 300 films from 50 countries, hosting outdoor events, special honors and more. “We’re so excited to be back with a full, live festival, operating safely of course,” says Todd Quartararo, the NBFF’s vice president of marketing and co-founder. “We are thrilled to give people the total festival experience.” The festival will kick off with the world premiere of “Never Catch Pigeons: And Eleven More Hard Lessons From Mr. Paul Van Doren,” a documentary about the founder of the Vans shoe company that brings together the festival’s action sports and business constituencies. Along with the screening, an outdoor…

For composer Hans Zimmer, scoring “Dune” was a dream come true. He read Frank Herbert’s massive sci-fi novel when he was 18 and has revisited it often, imagining the sounds of the desert planet Arrakis, the sandworms and the invaluable spice that makes interstellar travel possible. “The first person I talked to was Hans,” director Denis Villeneuve reports. The two were finishing work on 2017’s “Blade Runner 2049” at the time, and the composer became “obsessed with the idea of trying to create music from another world, from another time.” Nothing in the 11-time Oscar nominee’s 37-year, 140-film career sounds like “Dune.” Eerie, ominous and dramatic, it is a unique mix of choral, world-music, rock and electronic sounds created by friends and colleagues on three continents. Villeneuve wanted the score…

Though there’s a cornucopia of ways to stream video at home, Hub Entertainment Research has found that smart TVs are the most popular, with close to half of respondents saying they use theirs to stream weekly. This may come as a surprise to some, as big bets were being made in the latter part of the past decade that handheld devices would supersede TVs as the preeminent way to consume content. With the failure of DirecTV’s integration into AT&T and, more recently, the dissolution of Quibi, it’s clear viewers still prefer to watch on the biggest screen in the home. For more data from VIP+, visit variety.com/vip. Source: Hub Entertainment Research (Connected Home 2021 Report) Base: TV HHS (N=4,919)…

Katee Sackhoff and Robin Gadsby were married Oct. 1 weekend. “Tell me you had an amazing wedding without telling me you had an amazing wedding,” Sackhoff wrote on Instagram. Sackhoff starred on “Battlestar Galactica”; Gadsby is a writer and producer. Eliot Silver and Shelley Reinstein were married on Oct. 10 at Park Avenue Synagogue in NYC, followed by a reception at the Boom Boom Room. “Eliot and I were on and off for five years before the pandemic happened, and we finally had enough of breaking up!” Reinstein told Variety. Reinstein is the CEO of Autumn Communications; Silver is the founder of Nice Buns in Pasadena. They honeymooned in Napa Valley. Jesse Palmer and Emely Fardo announced that they were married in Connecticut in June 2020. “We were only able…

Oct. 9 ‘The Last Duel’ Premiere Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York Based on a true story, the Ridley Scott-directed drama stars Jodie Comer as a French noblewoman in the late 1300s who accuses her husband’s friend of rape. What ensues is a duel to the death between the husband (Matt Damon) and the accused (Adam Driver). “I was looking forward to giving this woman a voice,” Comer told Variety. “There was so little information about her, and she was the one who experienced this horrific attack, yet there was a whole encyclopedia about the men and how they fought and what they wore and who they were. To hear the creators’ main focus was to give her the opportunity to speak her truth was what really grabbed my attention.”…

The Grammy Awards have had no shortage of glamour or drama in recent years, and 2022 is likely to be no exception. Will Drake, Olivia Rodrigo, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, BTS and Lil Nas X have big looks? Will problematic artists including Kanye West and Morgan Wallen be in or out? Will the recent changes to the voting procedure make for more populist nominee and winners lists, or will it be more of the same? Variety’s music team overheated its phones and laptops to find out — and you can read all about it in these pages, and check back on Nov. 23 when the nominees for Music’s Biggest Night are announced.…

There are still millions of Americans among us who remember where they were when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 and countless millions more who have been inspired by the legacy of King’s historic work on behalf of civil rights. But there are few who’ve put their careers and companies on the line to advance King’s work more emphatically and dramatically than Byron Allen. In 2015, after settling a long-running lawsuit against AT&T for discrimination, Allen’s Entertainment Studios filed a $10 billion lawsuit against Charter Communications, claiming the telecommunications giant was in violation of the 1966 Civil Rights Act. After five years of legal wrangling and bruising media coverage, the two sides settled out of court. In that same year, Entertainment Studios also sued Comcast for $20…

“A great man doesn’t seek to lead; he’s called to it.” This is the line spoken by Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) to his son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) in “Dune,” Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic science-fiction novel. But it also underscores the remarkable journey that Mary Parent, vice chairman of Worldwide Production for Legendary and one of the film’s producers, took to become one of the most successful and respected executives in Hollywood. As its Oct. 22 release in the U.S. increases the gross of her projects to $4.7 billion, “Dune” marks her 16th credit as a theatrical film producer, culminating an eight-year journey for Parent, whom Variety is saluting as a billion-dollar producer, to bring the adaptation to the big screen, and more than 25 years of…

Has Jeffrey Wright worked nonstop since he fell in love with acting in college in the late 1980s? It seems like it. From indie hits to blockbusters to weighty TV series to Broadway, the actor, who can next be seen in Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” will justifiably be honored with Variety’s Legend and Groundbreaker award at the Newport Beach Film Festival, which this year runs from Oct. 21-28. The actor’s early career includes such projects as Lorraine Hansberry’s “Les Blancs” and Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock” at the Arena Theater; “The Playboy of the West Indies” and “Search and Destroy” at Yale Rep; but it was 1993’s “Angels in America: Perestroika” and “Millennium Approaches” that really supercharged his career. He won Tony and Drama Desk awards for “Perestroika.”…

After a year of pandemic-prompted shut-downs, the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) is bursting with excitement in anticipation of this year’s film festival. The eight-day fest, which runs from Oct. 23-30, will return in a hybrid virtual/in-person format, and student filmmakers are turning out to volunteer in numbers that have “happily surprised” and exceeded the expectations of Christina Routhier, longtime executive and artistic director SCAD theaters and festivals. “We have had such a great turnout and all of our volunteer meetings, and I think we’re going to be just fine,” Routhier says. “In regards to volunteer numbers, it hasn’t been as much as it has in years past: we have at least 400 to 500 volunteers where we would normally have 600 to 700. But our screenings are…

Lifelong addiction to Looney Tunes and their imaginary characters and real creators is not required to enjoy journalist Jaime Weinman’s “Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes,” but it will help the reader stay engaged when the tome becomes, shall we say, a bit academic. Any “serious” accounting of that place once known as “Termite Terrace” on the Warner lot is immediately courting danger when the imaginary subjects of your scholarship are known as “Bugs,” “Daffy,” “Porky,” et al and the “real” people have such names as “Tex,” “Chuck” and “Friz.” Detailing the creative origins of “that Oscar-winning rabbit, Bugs Bunny,” as Warner Bros. was proud to note, Weinman writes “Tex Avery’s ‘A Wild Hare’ is the film that established Bugs’ accent, his catchphrase, and his attitude.…

When making Netflix’s new Western “The Harder They Fall,” director Jeymes Samuel was inspired by his early love of the genre. “This is the Western he wanted to see as a kid,” costume designer Antoinette Messam says of Samuel’s film. “This is who he wanted to see in his Westerns and how he wanted to see those people dressed.” The movie is set in the late 1800s, but Samuel gave Messam free rein to use influences that would enhance her designs rather than be period-accurate when it came to dressing the cast, which includes Jonathan Majors, Regina King, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz and Idris Elba. Messam gravitated to denim as her fabric of choice, with the aim of showing the influence of African indigo in a color palette that ties…

After winning more than a few fans’ hearts — and a supporting actor Emmy nomination — as Chidi on “The Good Place,” William Jackson Harper takes center stage in HBO Max’s romantic anthology series “Love Life,” playing Marcus Watkins, a newly single 30-something trying to find his way. Harper can relate to the struggle: “I am the very definition of a late bloomer. Here I am at 41, just feeling like I know what my life is.” “Love Life” marks your first lead role and first time executive producing. What was the greatest challenge of taking on both simultaneously? Honestly, everything about producing was a challenge. People were asking me questions and actually cared about my opinion on certain things, and I’m not used to that. As an actor, I’m…

AWARDS CIRCUIT Whether you’re on the “Belfast” train or believe another film will steal the Oscars’ attention, being the front-runner too early can affect a movie’s awards chances. But playing catch-up can be even more challenging. Films dropping into the Oscar conversation late have proven effective for past best picture winners like “Million Dollar Baby” (2004). Still, since that time, Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” (2017) has been the only December release that has taken the top prize, with most others releasing within an October time frame. With the official phase one awards period less than a month away, several unseen and unknown entities have yet to screen. At the top of the list is del Toro’s remake of the 1947 classic, “Nightmare Alley.” This dark adaptation of…

Connor Franta shot to internet stardom as a YouTube personality. Since launching his channel in 2010, Franta, who was born and raised in Minnesota but moved to Los Angeles in 2013, has amassed more than 20 million followers across his social platforms. Now 29, he’s also a writer, a photographer and an LGBTQ advocate. His third book, “House Fires,” available now, is a collection of essays, photos and poems about dating, sex, relationships and his struggles with depression. • How did you come up with the title of the book? It’s something that’s completely comforting — a home — but then something that’s destructive, a fire. Life is essentially a series of house fires, where you’re building yourself up to some position, and then, it sounds sad, but you burn…

s Jennifer Aniston knows, a good haircut can make your career in Hollywood. But in Riz Ahmed’s case, so can a bad one. At age 22, the actor-producer-rapper fell victim to a “horrific bowl cut,” he recalls to Variety. In his arts program at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, the students deconstructed Shakespeare by day and hustled for acting jobs at night. “We were still doing headshots at drama school, so everyone was making sure they looked good,” he says. “I turn up with this hair and ended up looking like one of the Tipton Three. When Michael Winterbottom’s casting director saw my photo, I got a role.” Ahmed is referring to his big break, Winterbottom’s 2006 film “The Road to Guantánamo,” in which he…

For the first time in Grammy history, the race to accrue nominations — and ultimately the final contest itself — may come down to a battle of two teenage girls. Olivia Rodrigo, a newcomer at 18, and Billie Eilish, veritably a veteran now at 19, are the leading contenders to pick up multiple nods when the nominees for the 2022 Grammy Awards are announced Nov. 23. Yes, Eilish, whose birthday is Dec. 18, will officially have graduated out of her teens by the time the ceremony takes place Jan. 31, but it’ll still be a prodigy-vs.-prodigy contest in which elder voters likely won’t be holding youth against these preternaturally talented superstars. Rodrigo and Eilish may be the only two artists considered 100% locks to be nominated in the top three…

Taylor Swift announced some months back that she would not be submitting any of her re-recorded material from her hit “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” album for Grammy consideration — first off, presumably, because she wouldn’t want to split off votes from the all-new “Evermore” and secondly, because that would just seem ridiculous, right? And yet the Grammys have a history of liking new versions of older material, even if voters’ tolerance for notefor-note re-creations has yet to be tested. Affording honors in major categories to live albums peaked during the heyday of MTV Unplugged (see: Tony Bennett and Eric Clapton in the ’90s), yet giving nominations to live tracks became a way to fill out the undernourished rock categories, if nothing else, as recently as a few years ago (see the…

Machine Gun Kelly delivered a high-voltage shock to the music industry when he pivoted from rap to pop-punk with the release of his 2020 album, “Tickets to My Downfall.” Produced by Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, the 15-track record’s heavy guitars, upbeat tempos and honest lyricism kickstarted a revival of the pop-punk genre for a new generation. What’s more, the album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — a career milestone for Kelly, who has been releasing projects for over a decade — and has a shot at nabbing several Grammy nominations. Before playing in Nashville on his “Tickets to My Downfall” tour, Variety caught up with Kelly to discuss his musical evolution and what a Grammy nom would mean to him. How does it feel to finally be…

Entertainment mogul Byron Allen’s résumé lists Fairfax High and USC as the Los Angeles educational institutions of his formative years. Not to diminish their importance, when you hear Allen describing his youthful days when his single mother “couldn’t afford daycare” and plopped young Byron down at NBC where she worked, it’s quickly obvious that Allen had the world’s greatest showbiz teachers in the halls of a network television production center. The list of mentors Allen encountered and learned from at an early age includes Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, Freddie Prinze, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx, George Burns and Dean Martin. “As a kid,” recalls Allen, “I was able to watch how television was made and I thought, ‘What a wonderful way to go through life, making people laugh and making television…

Three decades after her start in show business, Sandy Powell has made such a mark with her work, that “costume designer” is often not needed as a prefix because people know the name. And if they don’t, they know the Brit artisan’s face and her fiery orange hair. The Academy Award-winning costume designer of such films as “The Aviator,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “The Young Victoria” is the recipient of Variety’s Creative Impact in Costume Design Award at the 24th annual SCAD Savannah Film Festival on Oct. 29. Straight out of college, Powell worked on music videos. Her first job, when she was 21, was with choreographer Lindsay Kemp, who had taught David Bowie, but the aspiring costume designer’s life would change when she met filmmaker Derek Jarman. It was…

PRESENTED BY OCTOBER 12 NEW YORK…

TV REVIEW Drama: ABC (13 episodes; 1 reviewed); Oct. 20 Starring: Brandy, Eve, Naturi Naughton, Nadine Velazquez The music video that opens ABC’s new drama “Queens” lays it on thick. Each member of the Nasty Girls — Naomi, aka Xplicit Lyrics (Brandy); Valeria, aka Butter Pecan (Nadine Velazquez); Jill, aka Da Thrill (Naturi Naughton); and Brianna, aka Professor Sex (Eve) — struts out of a burning mansion, across the bow of a luxurious yacht, and through a chorus line of half-nude dancers without missing a step. Directed by Tim Story, whose ’90s résumé boasts videos for Tyrese, ’N Sync and Ginuwine, the video for “Nasty Girl” knows what it has to do to evoke memories of the specific window in hip-hop history it’s trying to capture. In a key difference…