Innholdsfortegnelse for 3/16/2022 i Variety

Most major entertainment companies looking to lead in the global streaming road race have a go-big-or-go-home strategy — they’re building massive vehicles with broad, four-quadrant appeal. Sony has taken a different tack. Its lone direct-to-consumer streaming video business is Crunchyroll, geared to the Japanese art forms of anime and manga. Instead of pouring tens of billions into content to vie against the likes of Netflix and Disney Plus, it is flooding the zone for a distinct and passionate fan subculture. “The thesis is quite simple: We aspire to be everything to someone, not something to everyone,” says Colin Decker, CEO of Crunchyroll. “We’ve always been by and for anime fans and creators.” Adds Decker, “Our business has more in common with fans of the NFL than users of Netflix.” This…

Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, a four-time Oscar nominee, worked with Oscar winner William Hurt, who died March 13 at age 71, on “Body Heat” (1981), “The Big Chill” (1983), “The Accidental Tourist” (1988) and “I Love You to Death” (1990). William Hurt and I came into the movies together, and Bill had a huge impact on the way I thought about the process. We met when I was casting “Body Heat,” the first movie I directed. On our initial meeting, we talked for hours about movies and life. We were trying to guess what it would be like to take that journey together. I was still looking for my cast and eventually tested four couples for the two leads, but that first conversation with Bill stayed with me. Bill immediately brought…

AWARDS CIRCUIT A weekend trio of big wins for Netflix at the DGA, BAFTA and Critics Choice awards has given Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” the gas required to make it over the finish line. That’s if it can keep its closest competitors — “Belfast” from Kenneth Branagh and “CODA” from Siân Heder — at bay. The Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures, which is the top prize from the PGA Awards, has been one of the most vital and telling precursors from all major guilds. In 2009, both the PGA and the Oscars switched the voting for their highest honor to a preferential ballot system. In terms of films perceived to be divisive with audiences, PGA has become the litmus test for…

Camphor Brings Artful Touch Downtown L.A.’s Arts District is roaring back to life post-pandemic, and Camphor (above) is the latest addition to the lively scene. Located in the former Nightshade space, Camphor marries French technique with South Asian influences. Chefs Max Boonthanakit and Lijo George worked together at Alain Ducasse’s Blue in Bangkok, and they’re relishing the access to fresh local produce that had to be imported at their previous restaurant. Boonthanakit says they’re cooking “the food that we love to eat, but we try to pack in as much flavor as possible.” The mostly white space, broken up with pops of indigo, provides a minimal canvas. Delicately constructed dishes include Dungeness crab barbajuan (a sort of French empanada) or dry-aged, slow-roasted chicken seasoned with truffle and thyme and stuffed…

When this year’s Producers Guild of America Awards are handed out, along with those being recognized for their achievements in projects over the last year will be a handful of the industry’s top names, receiving the guild’s Honorary Awards. These Honorary Awards were not handed out during last year’s virtual ceremony, adding more excitement to this year’s in-person event. The 2022 Visionary Award, which recognizes a television, film or new media producer for unique or uplifting contributions to our culture through inspiring storytelling or performance, will be awarded to Issa Rae. The producer-actor-writer, whose HBO series “Insecure” wrapped up this year after five seasons, also served as executive producer on “A Black Lady Sketch Show” and “Sweet Life: Los Angeles,” to name a few of her credits. “Issa makes us…

As awards season heads to the home stretch with final Oscars voting to end on March 17, a few more guilds and societies honor their finest. The 58th annual Cinema Audio Society Awards will celebrate sound mixing for 2021 films and TV series. Among the nominees are “West Side Story,” “Dune” and “No Time to Die.” CAS president Karol Urban calls the awards a homecoming. “We have been receiving heartfelt inquiries and messages in anticipation of this event from sound mixers, and studios for months,” Urban says. With that and COVID protocols in place, she promises the night will be an unforgettable one of fellowship and celebration of the craft. Aside from the nominees, honorees are Paul Massey, receiving the CAS Career Achievement Award, and Ridley Scott, the CAS Filmmaker…

After a year off, the U.S.-Ireland Alliance’s 16th Oscar Wilde Awards returns on March 24, moving to the Ebell of Los Angeles from its longtime home of Bad Robot studios in Santa Monica. The awards celebrate contributions in entertainment notably from creatives who are Irish (and some who are not). This year’s honorees are Adam McKay, Kenneth Branagh, Jamie Dornan and Dónall Ó Héalai. “The whole purpose of the event is really to build ties between the industry in Northern Ireland, Ireland and the U.S. And so we built it around honoring talent that have some connection to Ireland,” Trina Vargo, founder and president of the U.S.-Ireland Alliance, told Variety. J.J. Abrams will be back as the night’s emcee, while Andrew Garfield is a presenter. Guests include Katie McGrath, Reinaldo…

Decades ago, in his landmark “Biographical Dictionary of Film,” critic David Thomson said of filmmaking legend Francis Coppola: “No one retains so many jubilant traits of the kid moviemaker.” As Coppola approaches production on “Megalopolis,” his biggest, most creatively ambitious project of the 21st century, that description seems more apt than ever. And a quick glance at the Variety archives vividly illustrates Coppola’s explosive emergence as a veritable force of nature while still enrolled as a film student at UCLA. The wunderkind announced his arrival with his name blasted in a Variety page one headline as the winner of a student screenwriting competition. The story below goes on to note: “The $2,000 first prize in UCLA’s eighth annual Samuel Goldwyn Foundation Creative Writing contest was won by Francis Ford Coppola,…

With final Oscar voting March 17, Variety staff members put forth their last-minute recommendations for artisans whose names they hope to hear at the 94th Academy Awards. If you haven’t cast your final vote, consider these accomplishments, from a music legend’s epic score to sweeping cinematography that could mean a historic win. Adam Stockhausen and Rena DeAngelo Production design, “West Side Story” The tremendous production design of “West Side Story” drew me into the story like nothing else I saw last year. Steven Spielberg’s remake rewrites the script of the musical, incorporating the looming demolition of the San Juan Hill neighborhood for the construction of Lincoln Center. “A cinematography win would be a first for a woman in the 94-year history of the Oscars.”-Peter Caranicas Stockhausen and DeAngelo’s work is…

SXSW got off to an uncharacteristically chilly start last week. As the annual ode to movies, music and tech kicked off on March 11 in Austin, the Texas winds blew a cold front into the downtown streets. Between screenings and musical acts, many attendees lamented that they hadn’t packed a heavy winter jacket. But by the weekend’s close, the frost had faded, and it felt like spring in Texas again. That’s a fitting metaphor for this year’s gathering. The festival, which runs through March 20, represents a time of renewal as the first SXSW since 2019 — the 2020 edition became one of the first major events to be canceled due to COVID-19, and the 2021 version didn’t take place either because vaccines weren’t widely available. (Variety’s parent company, Penske…

Lily Collins and director Charlie McDowell dove into marriage and a screen collaboration during the pandemic, with the upcoming Netflix feature “Windfall” the result. McDowell (“The One I Love,” “The Discovery”) and his partners were “coming up with ideas to stay creative, and to make something within the confines of a single location,” Collins tells Variety. “I remember being in the kitchen and living room, hearing them go from storyline to first draft to second draft. Very organically, I fell into one of the parts.” Collins, of the pop culture sensation “Emily in Paris,” stars opposite Jason Segel and Oscar nominee Jesse Plemons in the Hitchcockian home-invasion tale — equal parts thriller and socioeconomic study. Collins and Plemons play a wealthy married pair (known only as Wife and CEO) who…

For much of his childhood, Pablo Schreiber didn’t have a TV, let alone a video game system. So it wasn’t really until the 43-year-old actor was hired to star in “Halo” — Paramount Plus’ upcoming adaptation of Microsoft’s crown jewel Xbox franchise — that Schreiber sat down to play as the genetically engineered super soldier he’d been hired to embody: Petty Officer John-117, aka Master Chief. “I quickly realized just how new I was to this medium,” Schreiber tells Variety. “I spent the first few days of my Halo experience getting killed by grunts.” When the show premieres on March 24, it will be the culmination of 17 years of false starts and dogged striving, including a Peter Jackson-produced feature film that fell apart in the 2000s, more than six…

It’s been less than a year since the Oscars aired a stripped-down version of the show at Union Station, but the 95th annual Academy Awards is set to take place March 27, back at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. With voting opening March 17, we take a look at the top categories and where things stand. A Perfect 10 For the first year, the Oscars expanded the best picture race to guarantee 10 films. (In the past, there was the potential for 10, based on voting totals.) Jane Campion’s Netflix drama “The Power of the Dog” leads the pack with 12 nominations overall and a slew of best picture wins from critics’ groups and BAFTA. But Apple Original Films’ crowd-pleaser “CODA” has been picking up steam, including a batch of…

This year’s WGA film award nominees represent a roster of high-caliber talent. Nominees in the original screenplay category are Aaron Sorkin (“Being the Ricardos”), Adam McKay and David Sirota (“Don’t Look Up”), Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness and Jason Schwartzman (“The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun”), Zach Baylin (“King Richard”) and Paul Thomas Anderson (“Licorice Pizza”). Adapted screenplay nominees include Siân Heder (“CODA”), Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth (“Dune”), Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan (“Nightmare Alley”) and Steven Levenson (“Tick…Tick…Boom!”) and Tony Kushner (“West Side Story”). “The pandemic has been stressful and challenging for everyone,” says WGA West president Meredith Stiehm. “Many writers have been fortunate to be able to continue working because studios continued to need content. Like everyone else, writers are…

GRAY’S GOLD Oscar voters: If you still have films to watch before casting your Oscar ballot March 17-22, make sure one of them is director Pedro Almodóvar’s “Parallel Mothers.” The film boasts two nominations: Lead actress Penélope Cruz and the music score of Alberto Iglesias, both incredibly good. Though some subtitled films may seem like homework, this one is a treat from start to finish. The work of the two nominees is closely connected. Iglesias tells Variety that his assignment was to get inside the head of Cruz’s character, Janis. “The acting of Penélope is extraordinary. My idea was that the music is the narrator of her soul. I used different forms and shapes to give this idea that the music was inside Janis, in her body, in her head.”…

Seeking to improve cultural diversity in film and TV projects and commercial shoots, “Judas and the Black Messiah” costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones has established the Black Designer Database. Launched last year, the database is a resource for costume designers, stylists and publicists, but Jones began compiling it in 2009 as a tool to reference for her own work. Directors even turned to her for the names of Black creatives. “Since I started, I would organize larger brands and their PR contacts, but I kept a separate tab for Black designers,” she says, “and when I was on projects, I would try to work them into anything I was doing for representation’s sake.” Jones recently held a pop-up mixer as part of New York Fashion Week. “We had six Black…

FILM REVIEW Directors: Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert With: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan Nearly a quarter-century later, our collective cine-literacy has gotten so sophisticated that “Sliding Doors” seems no more challenging than a simple game of tic-tac-toe. But that doesn’t necessarily mean audiences can handle the gnarly, three-dimensional sudoku puzzle that is “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a milea-minute mind-bender from absurdist duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — aka the Daniels — that argues every conceivable variation of our lives exists in some alternate universe or other, then proceeds to give its harried heroine (Michelle Yeoh) a whirlwind tour of all those possibilities. The result is a mess, but a meticulously planned and executed mess, where every shot, every sound effect and every sight gag fits…

When DeVaughn Nixon and Norm Nixon Jr. both showed up in the casting offices of HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” on the same day — at the same time — it could have been awkward. And at first, it was. “They both lovingly shit-talked each other,” says exec producer Max Borenstein. “They were competitive, because they’re brothers, but it was kind of a ‘may the best man win.’” The actor siblings each wanted to play their father, early 1980s Los Angeles Lakers point guard Norm Nixon, in a key role: Owner Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) recruits rookie Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah) to inject some life into the stagnant team, but Johnson is a point guard — a position already filled by the elder Nixon. “We…

Sounds like Celine Dion (1) may be getting ready to release a new song! Sam Heughan (2) tells me that the legendary singer has recorded a track for “Text for You,” the “Outlander” actor’s upcoming romantic drama with Priyanka Chopra Jonas. Dion appears as herself in the film. “I believe she’s written a new song for the movie,” he said when we chatted on an upcoming episode of the “Just for Variety” podcast. A remake of the German hit “SMS für Dich,” the film follows a woman (Chopra Jonas) who grieves for her dead fiancé by sending romantic texts to his phone before finding out that the number has been reassigned to someone else (Heughan). Does Heughan get in on the singing? “I can’t possibly say,” he teased. “Succession” starts…

March 7 ‘The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey’ Premiere Regency Bruin Theatre, Westwood Producer and star Samuel L. Jackson spent 12 years developing the Apple original series about a 91-year-old in the throes of dementia who sets about to solve a mystery. Jackson’s mother struggled with the disease, and he hopes audiences will be moved to view their loved ones with more compassion. “These people that disappear on you and the light goes out in their eyes: Remember when they held you, when they cooked for you, when they just told you a story,” he told Variety. “Know that they’re in there somewhere. Love them like they loved you when they were there.” March 9 Costume Designers Guild Awards The Broad Stage, Santa Monica “Dune,” “Coming 2 America” and “Cruella”…

As they prepare for this season’s 33rd annual Producers Guild of America Awards on March 19, PGA presidents Gail Berman and Lucy Fisher are taking stock in the chaotic years they and the guild just navigated and look ahead at what’s to come. “Producers have prevailed!” says Fisher. “Despite difficulties and hardships our industry has faced, despite COVID and the boomerang effect we all felt with starting and stopping productions, high-quality entertainment got made and viewers around the world were happy to once again be able to enjoy new entertainment and were left wanting more.” Berman is excited to return to an in-person ceremony at the Fairmont Century Plaza, after last year’s virtual affair in light of the pandemic. “We, along with many in the industry, are excited to be…

When the ASC launched its awards in 1986, a single statue was given for feature film cinematography, presented by Gregory Peck to Jordan Cronenweth for his work on Francis Ford Coppola’s “Peggy Sue Got Married.” Now, 36 years later, the American Society of Cinematographers Awards is returning to the smaller scale of yore even as it promises to celebrate a wide range of image-makers. The ceremony will take place at the ASC Clubhouse, the org’s modest headquarters in Hollywood, rather than in a cavernous ballroom. But even though the ceremony has reduced its scale this year, the scope of the awards has continued to expanded significantly since that first event. Honors now go to TV categories as well as documentary. The ASC’s Spotlight Award joined the parade in 2013 to…

The Casting Society celebrates its 40-year anniversary this year just as the entertainment industry is marking the diversity and authenticity in the many roles in film and TV from “CODA” and “West Side Story” to “Bridgerton.” In honor of this landmark, the society’s leaders hoped to organize an in-person ceremony for the Artios Awards, their annual event honoring work by casting directors across film, television and theater. But when the Omicron surge showed the pandemic isn’t close to being over, CSA leadership realized it needed to pivot to a remote ceremony. “Our hope and desire was that we would be able to do this spectacular in-person celebration,” says Kim Williams, the vice president of casting at Disney Television Studios and the president of CSA. “But we decided for the health…

It may only be six months since 2021’s pandemic-delayed edition of Series Mania took place, but the annual Lille, France-based drama festival returns once again but this time in its traditional slot of March 18-25. It’s been “challenging” for the Series Mania team to pull together 2022’s program so soon after last year’s event, says general director Laurence Herszberg. However, it hasn’t been hard to attract projects to the festival. In a reflection of both Series Mania’s growing stature and the buoyant state of the scripted TV market, the event had 331 submissions from 46 different countries to the competition program. She says Series Mania, which was created in Paris in 2010 and moved to Lille in 2018, is very different from a giant TV sales market, which she reckons…

TV REVIEW Limited series: Hulu (eight episodes; all reviewed); March 29 With: Elle Fanning, Chloë Sevigny, Colton Ryan, Cara Buono Hulu’s new limited series “The Girl From Plainville,” which premiered at the SXSW festival on March 12 ahead of a March 29 launch on Hulu, faces — and surmounts — an interesting challenge: Its two lead characters have a relationship based almost entirely on text messages. But this show’s depiction of the virtual relationship between Michelle Carter (Elle Fanning) and Coco Roy (Colton Ryan) will keep viewers hanging on. The real Carter went on trial after she encouraged Roy over text in 2014 to kill himself. Here, the two appear to one another as if actually present. It’s only when one is distracted by real life — a parent or…