Variety 10/12/2022

“The Whale” is poised to be a dominant force this Oscar season. At the Venice Film Festival last month, the Darren Aronofsky-directed drama was met with a rapturous standing ovation. Its lead actor, Brendan Fraser, burst into tears — witnessed 17.6 million times and counting in a viral video of the moment captured by Variety. Suddenly, the star of “George of the Jungle” and “The Mummy” became the object of sympathetic cheers across the internet, and now he’s possibly the frontrunner to win the best actor Oscar in March. In this week’s cover story, Fraser and Aronofsky discuss mounting a film adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play about a 600-pound gay man desperate to reconnect with his estranged daughter (played by Sadie Sink). Their first full-length conversation in print is…

Variety executive editor Brent Lang wrote the cover story for our annual celebration of New York. It’s a city he loves. He’s spent the better part of two decades here, aside from an aborted stint in L.A., whose freeways caused him to swear off driving forever. Deputy music editor Jem Aswad spoke with singer Santigold, who recently canceled her tour, about the challenges facing acts that rushed back to the road after two years of lockdown. “For most musicians, touring is how they make a living,” he writes. “If they can’t, what happens to music?” Chief TV critic Caroline Framke interviewed Emily Ratajkowski for the New York issue, one of her favorite editions. She looks forward to having some spaghetti and raising a glass (of red, the bolder the better) in…

This past spring, as the omicron wave subsided and the world began a ready-or-not return to something resembling normal, the floodgates opened and thousands of musicians went back on the road. Audiences flocked to arenas and big theaters to see Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo, Elton John and many others. Coachella launched the festival season with a bang, and smaller clubs began to cautiously figure out how to put on shows in tight spaces. It was a bumpy start — many acts (even Sir Elton and Bon Jovi) had to cancel or postpone shows because of positive COVID tests — but a start nonetheless. Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino says ticket sales are on their way to a record year. “At my level, even before COVID, it was only profitable when…

Five years after sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein ignited the global #MeToo movement, the former film producer is back in court. The convicted rapist is facing 11 charges in Los Angeles, separate from the sexual assault allegations that led to his monumental 2020 criminal trial in New York and his subsequent conviction, for which he is serving 23 years. Weinstein’s trial, which got underway Oct. 10, is one of four #MeToo cases playing out in courtrooms across America this week. Danny Masterson’s rape trial is taking place across the hall from Weinstein’s; on the other coast, writer-director Paul Haggis is on trial for rape, while Kevin Spacey is facing Anthony Rapp, who has claimed that Spacey sexually abused him when he was 14 years old. These sexual violence cases…

Making “Armageddon Time” proved both a gift and weirdly traumatizing for director James Gray, who revisited his old New York City stomping grounds for the Focus Features release arriving in theaters next month. One of Gray’s most personal films yet, it loosely follows his experiences as a student at the private Kew-Forest School in Queens during the 1980s. While Gray could not shoot in his childhood home — the current owners didn’t grant filming permission — it didn’t stop neighborhood friends from coming out to see him when he toured the area. “It felt like a gift,” Gray says of those interactions. But his warm feelings faded in the editing bay. “When I saw the footage, it was oddly disturbing and weirdly traumatizing,” he says. “I don’t know why I…

Angela Lansbury, the beloved actor whose 75-year career encompassed triumphs on the big screen, in musical theater and on TV, died Oct. 11 at her Los Angeles home. She was 96 — five days shy of her 97th birthday. Nominated for three Oscars, she won five competitive TonyAwardsandearned18Emmynominations, 12 alone for her role as the flinty crime-solving novelist Jessica Fletcher on the long-running CBS drama “Murder, She Wrote.” Lansbury’s mother, Moyna Macgill, appeared in West End productions, and her younger twin brothers Bruce and Edgar became film and TV producers. While in her late teens, Lansbury scored a supporting actress Oscar nom for her first role, as the scheming cockney maid, opposite Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in the 1944 classic “Gaslight.” Lansbury landed a contract at MGM and appeared…