Innholdsfortegnelse for 9/20/2023 i Variety

One of Google’s founding principles, famously, was “Don’t be evil.” The U.S. government isn’t accusing the internet behemoth of behaving evilly, exactly — but it is alleging Google violated antitrust law to preserve its virtual monopoly on search. Almost three years after the Justice Department filed its antitrust suit against Google, a trial in the case commenced Sept. 12 in D.C. District Court and is expected to run 10 weeks. It’s a watershed moment: United States of America v. Google LLC marks the first antitrust case to go to trial since the U.S. attempted to break apart Microsoft in the late ’90s over tying the Internet Explorer browser to Windows. What’s the likely outcome? Legal experts say the case will probably have limited effect on the search market or how…

Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews has been promoted to president of CBS News. A 30-year CBS News veteran, Ciprian-Matthews most recently served as executive VP for newsgathering. Anthony Abner has been promoted to global general counsel and executive VP of business and legal affairs for BMG. Abner, who joined the music giant in 2018, reports to CEO Thomas Coesfeld. Lee Straus has been named executive VP and head of business and legal affairs for 44 Blue Prods., part of Peter Chernin’s North Road Co. Straus previously was executive VP of business affairs for NBCUniversal TV’s alternative and specials unit. Lauren Papapietro has joined Warner Music Group as VP of communications for the Warner and Rhino catalog. The 15-year PR veteran comes to WMG from Crush Music.…

Variety’s Entertainment and Technology Summit returns Sept. 21, bringing together industry powerhouses who will weigh in on reaching audiences across platforms, utilizing progressive technologies and helping brands connect with viewers. The summit, presented by City National Bank, will take place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills and feature a full day of panels and speakers. Condé Nast Entertainment president Agnes Chu, who will speak at the “Building Hit Entertainment Across Platforms” panel, aims to reach audiences who already enjoy the company’s branded events such as the Met Gala and Vanity Fair Oscar party. “We want to deliver [content] in a way that meets audiences where they are, where I know there are fans of fashion and celebrity — being able to do a livestream and take clips of…

The documentarian Roger Ross Williams usually establishes trust by getting a meal with his subjects before shooting. In the case of “The Super Models,” he and co-director Larissa Bills were meeting four legends. Cindy Crawford hosted the pair at her Malibu home; Christy Turlington took them to a bookstore in Manhattan; Naomi Campbell Zoomed them from her closet. (“She was very apologetic,” says Bills, but “her closet was as big as my apartment.”) In early 2020, Crawford, Turlington, Campbell and Linda Evangelista came to Imagine Entertainment with the notion of executive producing a documentary about their reign over fashion in the 1980s and ’90s. Williams, an Oscar winner for 2009’s “Music by Prudence,” and Bills were brought in to tell their collective story of living as icons — and finding…

AWARDS CIRCUIT “Poor Things” can win things. That’s a nugget of information we gleaned at the conclusion of Venice, Telluride and Toronto, the three major fall festivals. For starters, Yorgos Lanthimos’ sci-fi dramedy collected the Golden Lion at Venice. Divided into palettes of monochrome and bold color, “Poor Things” is led by a cast of Oscar regulars, including winner Emma Stone (“La La Land”) and oft-nominated Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe. Steered by distributor Searchlight Pictures, responsible for four best picture victors since 2009, Lanthimos’ latest opus has already established itself as a formidable contender. Another noticeable trend: Biopics and inspirational stories dotted the festival lineups. Ava DuVernay’s “Origin,” a biographical drama adapted from Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” boasts a moving performance from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor,…

Don’t look down. I’ve never been good with heights. And no one would accuse me of being a thrill-seeker. And yet, here I am, 12 stories above downtown Los Angeles — about to walk on air. It’s the afternoon before the kickoff of production on “The Amazing Race” Season 35, and the show’s producers are testing out one of the first challenges: Contestants will have to walk a tightrope between two wings of the famed Biltmore Hotel, high above Pershing Square. The Biltmore is celebrating its 100th birthday this year; I just want to make it to 50. And yet, I have agreed to don a helmet and get harnessed up to try the stunt myself. Unlike the “Amazing Race” players, however, I’m not doing this to win a million…

FILM REVIEW Director: Craig Gillespie Starring: Paul Dano, Shailene Woodley, Pete Davidson A lot of the young men who became stock traders in the 1980s saw themselves as rebels: the new swingers of greed. Of course, they weren’t really rebels. But it felt good to them to think of themselves that way. Keith Gill (Paul Dano), the central figure in Craig Gillespie’s smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama “Dumb Money,” is an amateur stock trader who also sees himself as a rebel. Keith, unlike the Wall Street players, actually is trying to fight the system. But he may be nearly as caught up in illusions as they are. A long-haired Middle American nerd who lives in Brockton, Mass., with his wife (Shailene Woodley) and infant daughter, Keith works for the…

Stuart Gordon is known as a master of horror, a title earned from his work on such seminal 1980s films as “Re-Animator,” “From Beyond” and “Dolls.” But the director, who died in 2020, was also a master storyteller — so his family can be forgiven for thinking he was prone to fabulation. “I would compare it to the movie ‘Big Fish’ in how someone might exaggerate,” recalls Jillian Gordon, one of his three daughters. “He would tell you these stories, and you’d think, ‘Is that really what happened?’ It was only after he passed and I was going through his emails and archives that I realized it was all true.” Indeed, Gordon made movies, but his life had enough twists, turns and serendipitous encounters to command its own film. Now…

FOR DECADES, SPORTS on television was a bulletproof business. Live games, airing on local stations or national networks, reliably brought in big audiences and even bigger advertising hauls. Inside of just a few years, though, nearly everything about the way TV makes money from sports has begun to change as the industry’s transition to streaming upends the marketplace. Into this volatile mix, Endeavor has drop-kicked a newly created sports entity that is built for the future of both television and fandom. As of Sept. 12, that new entity has started trading on the NYSE under the feisty ticker symbol TKO. “We sit at the epicenter of large and fast-growing markets,” Endeavor president Mark Shapiro promises. “We live in the world of the super fan.” TKO Group Holdings was birthed as…

When Gareth Edwards directed his first movie, the 2010 indie “Monsters,” it could scarcely have been a more DIY endeavor. He had less than $500,000 to tell an intimate story about two Americans contending with giant aliens rampaging through Mexico, so his crew consisted of just his actors (Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able), a sound tech, a line producer, a translator and a driver. Edwards operated the camera, grabbing footage guerrilla style whenever they came upon a compelling location while traveling through Central America. Then the young director created all 250 visual effects shots for the film himself, alone in his flat. Thirteen years later, Edwards’ latest film, “The Creator,” is in so many ways the opposite of “Monsters.” The budget is $80 million. 20th Century Studios is distributing it…

• ALL OF US STRANGERS Telluride (Searchlight Pictures) Remember the father-son monologue in “Call Me by Your Name”? Andrew Haigh’s supernatural drama feels like a feature-length expansion of that scene as a gay man (Andrew Scott) reconnects with his dead parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) just as he’s getting to know a promising new boyfriend (Paul Mescal). Loosely inspired by Taichi Yamada’s novel “Strangers,” the low-key English-language adaptation is a curious kind of ghost story, at once incredibly tender and profoundly devastating as it slowly reveals its secrets. —Peter Debruge • THE BIKERIDERS Telluride (20th Century Studios) Most of Jeff Nichols’ movies take place down dirt roads in rural areas. Here, he brings us into the big city — or the outskirts, at least — zeroing in on the…