Innholdsfortegnelse for 1/26/2022 i Variety

Call me skeptical but are we really to take seriously last week’s pronouncement that a full-blown movie production studio and sports arena are going to be built in space? Seems so ludicrous and way too sci-fi to me, but then maybe I’m just not space-wok enough to buy it. We ran a story on Jan. 19 that Space Entertainment Enterprise, a company that said it was co-producing Tom Cruise’s planned space movie, was aiming to build a space station module by December 2024 that would host films, television, music and sports events, and enable artists, producers and other creatives to make content in the “low-orbit, microgravity environment.” Axiom Space, which received NASA’s approval in January 2020 to build a commercial component of the International Space Station, is supposed to undertake…

Jonathan Krisel was executive producer of “Baskets,” starring Louie Anderson, which aired on FX from 2016-19. Anderson, who died at age 68 on Jan. 21, won an Emmy for his performance as Christine on the show, which also starred Zach Galifianakis. Louie bought the entire crew Arby’s one night. He had already filmed his scenes for the day, but he wanted to spoil us. He even brought the manager from the Arby’s to help pass out all the food. He was just like that. He knew everyone on the crew so well. When we’d be setting up a shot and the cinematographer and I would be discussing if we wanted the shot “dirty” — meaning in a close-up you see a piece of the off-camera actor — if Louie heard…

Today’s media firms are clearly compensating for COVID production delays — they’ve been spending exorbitantly on programming — and that won’t stop in the year ahead. Research firm Ampere Analysis recently estimated content spending globally would hit roughly $233.2 billion in 2022, up about 6% over 2021. Ampere’s estimates are on a P&L basis, which are different from and generally lower than figures calculated on a cash basis. Ampere forecasts Comcast to be the biggest content spender in 2022, at $22.3 billion, with $7.3 billion of that total going toward sports rights, including the Olympics. Sports broadcasts in 2022 should help boost the company’s streamer Peacock, which since launch has had an originals push that’s lagged behind other late streaming entrants like Disney Plus and HBO Max. For more data…

The Dutchess Reigns Over Ojai If getting out of town sounds like a good idea, Ojai’s restaurant scene is looking bright with the opening of The Dutchess, an all-day spot from the Rustic Canyon family of restaurants. With a bakery, bar and full-service restaurant, it combines the talents of chef Saw Naing, formerly of Bouchon and Tallula’s, and baker Kelsey Brito, formerly of Huckleberry and Milo + Olive. In the daytime, there are Brito’s pastries and coffee, while Naing’s dinner menu focuses on the specialties of his native Myanmar. Full lunch and brunch menus are due in the next few weeks. After Rustic Canyon owners Josh Loeb and Zoe Nathan started a little farm in Ojai, launching The Dutchess was a natural addition to the laid-back community. “What I really…

Regina King and Aunjanue Ellis have shared the screen twice, in 2004’s “Ray” and 2018’s “If Beale Street Could Talk.” In both outings, the actors played adversaries — first as songstresses competing for Ray Charles’ affections and then as the mothers of the central lovers in “Beale Street” who don’t see eye to eye about their children’s relationship. “I feel like we’ve been robbed,” King says. “We need to have something where it’s just me and you all the way through.” To which Ellis jokes: “What do you mean? Two women actually talking on screen?” The laughs continue as the actors discuss their creative process crafting their latest characters — King’s “Treacherous” Trudy Smith in “The Harder They Fall” and Ellis’ Oracene Price, mother to (and coach of) future tennis…

Benedict Cumberbatch is so over Zoom. But a new spike in COVID-19 cases with the omicron variant has meant that his planned sit-down with Penélope Cruz will instead unfold over a screen. It’s a change that’s causing some technical hurdles. A vacationing Cruz (who is somewhere in Spain) is battling a weak internet connection, and Cumberbatch is grappling with instructions that require him to upload video to the cloud, check his microphone levels and make sure that his iPad battery doesn’t run out. “Is there an actor who enjoys this process?” he asks with an exaggerated sigh. But once the conversation gets going, the two performers — who briefly appeared together in 2016’s “Zoolander 2” — quickly fall into a familiar rhythm as they talk about their most recent films…

What do Andrew Garfield and Rachel Zegler have in common? To start, they both love the theater, musicals — and each other. “You are in my favorite movie of the year,” Garfield tells 20-year-old Zegler on a recent video conversation about her first film role, as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” “You are in my favorite movie of the year,” Zegler gushes back to Garfield about his turn as the composer Jonathan Larson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Tick, Tick… Boom!” And she’s also a super fan of Garfield’s surprise return to playing Peter Parker in the box office phenomenon “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” a movie that made her sob. Needless to say, these former theater kids have a lot to talk about. ANDREW GARFIELD: What you’ve done is just…

NBCUniversal is about to begin broadcasting the second half of a rare Olympics doubleheader — and fatigue has set in. The Winter Games in Beijing begin Feb. 4, just six months after the close of the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games that were postponed from 2020 because of the pandemic. The Winter Games also overlap with the Super Bowl, which airs on NBC Feb. 13. In an era of waning live viewership for the Olympics, NBCU is facing a huge challenge of attracting eyeballs to an event taking place amid a diplomatic boycott of the host country over human-rights violations. Mix in Beijing’s very limited group of spectators due to the omicron surge and the fact that the primetime TV audience for the Tokyo games dropped more than 40% compared with…

The 2014 film “John Wick” has spawned several sequels, the upcoming TV series “The Continental,” the spin-off film “Ballerina,” and even video games, theme park rides and comic books. It’s now a full-fledged universe, even though it didn’t start out that way. “It was kind of accidental,” says Tim Heindl, senior VP of global marketing research at Lionsgate. “But the way the film was constructed, it was built to be expanded upon.” The tremendous success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and others like “Star Trek” and “Star Wars”) has made it a benchmark for studios and networks eager to take popular intellectual property and expand it. Universes are popping up everywhere, including in TV: the DC Universe inhabits much of The CW’s real estate, “The Walking Dead” has been a…

Singer Ellen Foley, Meat Loaf and writer-producer Jim Steinman first worked together on a National Lampoon tour in the mid-’70s, then on the making of 1977’s “Bat Out of Hell,” one of the most popular albums of all time. Foley and Meat Loaf sang a memorable duet on “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” but she declined to go on tour with him for the album, pursuing her own music projects before reuniting with him on what would be his final album, “Braver Than We Are,” in 2016. Foley spoke with Variety about Meat Loaf, born Marvin Lee Aday, after he died Jan. 20 at age 74. When I think of him, I think of myself as this girl who did her first Actors’ Equity show with him in this National…

AWARDS CIRCUIT A shortened eligibility year, multiple monochrome films and an underappreciation of animation sum up 2021 at the movies. Academy members will begin voting for their favorites on Jan. 27, with nomination voting concluding Feb. 1. Once again, streamers and VOD platforms provided an avenue for many films to be seen by audiences during the pandemic. We should be grateful for their inclusion in this new world order but must never forget the magic and the power of the movie theater. I can’t recall being more emotional than I was stepping into the TCL Chinese Theatre in June to watch Jon M. Chu’s “In the Heights.” It was my first time back in a cinema in more than a year, and I cried for more than two hours —…

The second episode of “Euphoria” Season 2 begins in a luxe walk-in closet as Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie) playsdress-up with a wealthy mom’s clothes while babysitting. She slinks into designer dresses and lavish jewels, all while staring at her richer, more sophisticated reflection in the mirror. The fantasy comes to a halt when the mom comes home earlier than expected, forcing her to hastily change back into her miniskirt and halter top. The act of dressing up and sartorial reinvention is a pronounced theme throughout the season. While Zendaya’s Rue remains at the center, the surrounding characters’ outfits became a talking point online after the second season premiered. Below, series costume designer Heidi Bivens talks about finding the right looks for Maddy, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), Kat Hernandez (Barbie Ferreira) and…

Nicole Kidman and Kristen Stewart both delve into iconography — and play with their own images — on screen. In “Being the Ricardos,” Kidman takes on Lucille Ball, portraying her both in character as TV’s Lucy Ricardo and as a creative force on the set of “I Love Lucy.” It’s a role whose resilience and grit calls to mind Kidman herself, at the top of her game decades into her career. And in “Spencer,” Stewart plays Princess Diana over a turbulent three days spent with the British royal family. Her work leverages Stewart’s glamour and her toughness, while showing us sides of the actor we hadn’t seen before. NICOLE KIDMAN: We were meant to work together how many years ago [on “Panic Room”]? KRISTEN STEWART: I was 10 years old. KIDMAN:…

Since starring together as hero and villain of 2012’s “Skyfall,” Daniel Craig and Javier Bardem have continued to test themselves on screen. Last year, Craig finally bid farewell to James Bond with “No Time to Die,” a moody sendoff for his iteration of the British superspy. Meanwhile, Bardem flexed comic and musical chops as the bandleader and early television star Desi Arnaz in “Being the Ricardos.” DANIEL CRAIG: Are we supposed to talk intelligently for 30 minutes? I’m not sure I’m capable of doing that. And I know I’m not capable of talking intelligently about acting for 30 minutes. JAVIER BARDEM: Imagine me doing it in English. CRAIG: Terrifying. BARDEM: So we have lots of things in common. We were born almost on the same day. CRAIG: Almost on the…

Prior to 2021, Ariana DeBose and Simu Liu had certainly worked as actors. DeBose was a Tony nominee (“Summer: The Donna Summer Musical”) who’d appeared in Netflix’s “The Prom” and Apple TV Plus’ “Schmigadoon!” Liu was a former stuntman who’d co-starred on the Canadian sitcom “Kim’s Convenience.” But after their breakout roles last year — DeBose as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s reimagining of “West Side Story” and Liu as Shang-Chi in Marvel Studios’ superhero blockbuster “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” — they’ve both suddenly become household names. SIMU LIU: We’ll get to the amazingness that is “West Side Story” and how incredible you are in it. Before we do, I had a different question that maybe goes back a little bit further. You achieved a life dream…

In “House of Gucci,” Jared Leto vanishes into a larger-than-life performance as fashion world ne’er-do-well Paolo Gucci. By contrast, Oscar Isaac’s turns in Paul Schrader’s “The Card Counter” (as William Tell, a poker player with a dark past in the Iraq War) and Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” (as Duke Leto, the head of a powerful interstellar dynasty) are tightly contained. But the two actors still find many similarities to discuss, including their future as Marvel superheroes — Leto’s Morbius and Isaac’s Moon Knight — and their alternate careers as musicians starting in the 1990s. Isaac fronted the ska-punk band the Blinking Underdogs, which he left in 2001 to study acting at Juilliard, and Leto is the lead vocalist and songwriter for Thirty Seconds to Mars, which still tours. JARED LETO: We…

Looking back at the last 50 years, you’d be hard-pressed to say the world has gotten a lot more harmonious since then — not figuratively, in the geopolitical sphere, and certainly not literally, in a popular music world that’s become a slave to the rhythm, and to singers’ disinterest in sharing a mic, much less a spotlight. But you can’t fault the Manhattan Transfer for not doing their part — and just about everyone else’s, too — to keep the spirit of harmony alive ever since the group formed in 1972. At their modern-day shows, attendees may not know whether to weep or to literally get a buzz on from the actual physiological oscillation produced by four master voices meticulously coming together. (A combination of both responses is, of course,…

The Sundance Film Festival kicked off its second virtual edition last weekend, a concession to the highly contagious nature of COVID’s latest variant. While the movies received a more muted reception than in past years, when a standing ovation at Park City’s Eccles Theater was enough to trigger an all-night bidding war, there’s been no shortage of headline-making moments. Here are five takeaways from a festival at midpoint. ‘Sharp Stick’ Stumbles More than a decade after “Tiny Furniture” made Lena Dunham a voice of a generation (to quote “Girls”), she returned with “Sharp Stick,” the story of a young woman’s sexual awakening that was expected to be one of the hotter titles at the fest. Unfortunately, critics were mostly cold to Dunham’s vision, faulting her for creating a central character…

When HBO Max drops the fifth and final season of Neapolitan gangster saga “Gomorrah” on Jan. 27, it will also mark the end of a convoluted seven-year journey for Italy’s most widely exported TV show. “In Italian TV, there is a before and after ‘Gomorrah,’” says Nils Hartmann, senior VP of Germany and Italy for Sky Studios, the production arm of the pay TV operator that originated the gritty, hyperrealistic crime skein. Besides attaining megahit status in Italy, the show has traveled to 190 countries, including the U.S., where it ran into snags due to the misdeeds of Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Co.’s 2018 bankruptcy. “It was a big mess,” says Oliver Bachert, sales chief at Germany’s Beta, which was selling the show. He notes that on top of…

Addison Rae (1) has a very personal reason for inviting fans to help her raise money for the American Cancer Society. Her maternal grandfather is a survivor of kidney cancer. “A lot of my memories of him from when I was young was in the hospital,” the TikTok star tells me. “It was rough for my family to go through that. But luckily, my pawpaw is a very strong man who still to this day tries to do everything he did when he was 20 years old. He’s very inspiring.” For $10, Rae’s fans can enter a sweepstakes for a chance to win a trip to the Super Bowl in Los Angeles next month and attend the game with Rae. “I grew up in Louisiana, so football is pretty big…

Since their first meeting, Jamie Dornan and Kirsten Dunst have followed similar trajectories. They initially played off one another in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film “Marie Antoinette” — his eligible Swedish count set off sparks with her teen queen of France. After each starred in blockbuster trilogies (“Spider-Man” for Dunst and “Fifty Shades” for Dornan), they moved on to more challenging indie work. This past year, both actors played parents struggling with circumstance: In Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” Dunst portrays Rose, a lonely alcoholic whose marriage into a 1920s Montana ranch family destabilizes her. And in Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical “Belfast,” Dornan is also trying to escape his surroundings. As Pa, a character based on the director’s father, he attempts to protect his family from the 1969 troubles in…

When Jessica Chastain (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) and Rita Moreno (“West Side Story”) meet to discuss their respective works, each has done her homework. Moreno has watched Chastain’s catalog, and praises “Tammy Faye” to the heavens — pun intended — while also complimenting her recent HBO series, “Scenes From a Marriage,” with Oscar Isaac. “I have to say that you and Oscar have the most gorgeous chemistry,” Moreno says. For Chastain’s part, she’s studied Moreno as an actor and a cultural figure for years, and says, “You are such a gift to our industry,” as she asks Moreno about the difficulties she’d encountered in Hollywood — thereby opening the door for a very personal conversation. And then there’s the story of the time Moreno ran into Chastain at a…

This season, both Bradley Cooper and Mahershala Ali are pulling off a double act. Cooper’s fans can see him in two period pieces: As the lead of “Nightmare Alley,” in which he plays a tormented mentalist desperate for validation in the 1940s traveling-carnival scene, and as a key supporting player in “Licorice Pizza,” in which he’s a deranged version of the producer Jon Peters. Ali’s double duty is more forward-looking, and more literal: In the futuristic sci-fi film “Swan Song,” the Oscar winner plays a dying man as well as the clone who may replace him. MAHERSHALA ALI: How was it making the transition from playing Stanton in “Nightmare Alley” to playing Jon in “Licorice Pizza”? BRADLEY COOPER: The reason that I didn’t give up acting is Paul Thomas Anderson.…

They met 20 years ago in a fictional Oval Office and have stayed real friends. On Aaron Sorkin’s hit TV drama “The West Wing,” Bradley Whitford played deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman, who crushes on Marlee Matlin’s whiz pollster Joey Lucas. The on-screen flirtation quickly became a fan favorite in the era before Twitter memes, but their latest roles have infiltrated the social media zeitgeist. Whitford and Matlin reunite on a Zoom call to talk about them. In the Sundance darling “CODA,” Matlin plays Jackie, the matriarch of a deaf family who struggles to find common ground with her hearing — and college-bound — daughter Ruby (Emilia Jones). And in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial triumph “Tick, Tick… Boom!,” Whitford portrays the tough but lovable lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who advised on…

“Misty watercolor memories of the way we were…” “Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind…” “I could sell my soul for just a little light in the heat of the night…” Those lyrics, just three of the hundreds written by Marilyn Bergman, along with her husband, Alan, resonate with millions of moviegoers and record-buyers. Marilyn, who died on Jan. 8, was a three-time Oscar winner, fourtime Emmy winner and two-time Grammy winner for her accomplishments across six decades. The Bergmans were poets, although she denied it (“they’re totally different disciplines,” she said in 2015), who found their calling in lyric writing, mostly for movies. For “The Happy Ending,” director Richard Brooks asked them for a song that would work for both the beginning of a…

When hairstylist Barry Lee Moe took on the job of turning Sebastian Stan into Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, he thought a wig would help embody the 1990s rocker’s look. But for Hulu’s limited series “Pam & Tommy,” which premieres Feb. 2, Stan wanted the freedom to touch his hair and feel it. “He wanted it to feel lived in,” explains Moe. Since these conversations were occurring months before filming, Moe asked Stan to grow out his hair so they could move forward without a wig and get the perfect cut and color. He took Stan to Harper Salon on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles to get his hair treated with a Brazilian straightening process. “We did that to eliminate his texture because his was different from Tommy’s,” says Moe.…

TV REVIEW Directors: Coodie Simmons, Chike Ozah With: Kanye West, Coodie Simmons, Donda West, Kid Cudi, Jay-Z Netflix’s epic Kanye West documentary, “Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” will unfold in three feature-length parts, as the subtitle promises. But however the filmmakers carve up the 277-minute running time, the way they’ve encapsulated West’s story really boils down to a two-act narrative: rags to riches followed by, of course, riches to rumpuses. Is your preferred archetype of Kanye the hungry, deeply focused, self-made scrapper who showed everybody? Or the openly bipolar billionaire whose run for president felt more like a box to check on a list of Ultimate Hubris moments than anything even half-seriously intended? Both Kanyes are on view in “Jeen-yuhs,” with a story that necessarily comes off deeply bifurcated, given that…