Innholdsfortegnelse for 04/17/2024 i Variety

For an artist looking to break Coachella, it pays to enlist friends at a cutting-edge production firm. At this year’s festival (which began April 12-14 and repeats April 19-21), L.A.-based Silent House laid claim to designing and executing the elaborate productions for three of the four headliners. While its concepts for No Doubt skewed to a traditional rock-band setup, the studio went wild — and fully cinematic — for Doja Cat’s and Tyler, the Creator’s extravagant shows. The morning after the first weekend, Silent House’s designers unpacked just what went into the performers’ most feature-film-worthy scenes. Tyler’s stage design had the rapper dressed in a ranger uniform, sitting in a trailer in a Monument Valley-style desert. Just your average hiphop scenario, right? A filmed segment inside led to an expectant…

It was in the land that took “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” as its motto that women were first allowed to participate in the Olympic Games, in 1900. This summer, the French capital will come full circle as it hosts the first-ever gender-balanced Olympics. From politicians to business titans to cultural leaders, the most powerful forces in Paris are aligning to make the three weeks of the Games a showcase for the modernity of France. Tony Estanguet, the gold medal-winning French slalom canoeist who is now president of the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, says the event has come a “long way in terms of inclusiveness.” Back in 1900, women athletes made up only 2% of Olympic delegates; this year, women will represent half of the 15,000…

Davis Wright Tremaine Anastasia Alen Counsel Los Angeles-based Alen worked production legal services for Amazon Studios’ “Jury Duty” including making rapid on-set judgments and risk analysis. In media content matters and talent negotiations, she also advises Spotify negotiating deals for original podcasts “Case 63” and the long-term agreement with sports personality Ryen Russillo on behalf of “The Ringer.” Earlier, Alen worked in business affairs at William Morris Endeavor and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Latham & Watkins Dixon Carvalho Anderson Associate A former professional baseball player who later worked as a Major League Players Assn. certified agent, Anderson specializes in clients from the sports world. Although he can’t name names, he litigates cases involving entertainment and media, too, helping a pop icon protect her IP in jurisdictions around the world. The versatile…

Under the Bridge Platform Hulu Premiere date April 17 Episodes 8 Creator Quinn Shephard Cast Lily Gladstone, Vritika Gupta, Riley Keough In Hulu’s dark, gripping “Under the Bridge,” adapted for television by Quinn Shephard and based on Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 nonfiction account of the same name, the audience finds itself in the picturesque community of Victoria, British Columbia. After attending a party with her “friends” near the infamous Craigflower Bridge, 14-year-old Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) never returns home. Much more than a retelling of a horrific true crime, “Under the Bridge” is a show about longing, otherness, race and the frailties of community. The series was greenlit in 2022, a week before Godfrey’s death at 54 from lung cancer. The story has numerous characters and jumps around in time, but…

Mark Twain once quipped, “Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind it, it doesn’t matter.” When it comes to Martin Scorsese, age certainly isn’t making a difference. After landing 10 Oscar nominations for last year’s historical crime epic “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the 81-year-old director has mapped out his next several projects. Sources say he plans to shoot two films back to back: the first about Jesus, the second a Frank Sinatra biopic. The Oscar-winning director who helped usher in the Hollywood New Wave of the 1970s is looking to bypass the studio system and independently finance “Life of Jesus,” based on Shūsaku Endō’s 1973 book. He took the same approach with the 2016 drama “Silence” (which also was adapted from an Endō novel).…

A little over 10 years ago, David Adjmi was on an airplane, listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and picturing Robert Plant recording the vocals. “It’s communicating desire and pain and anguish and torture and lust,” Adjmi says of the song. “I was thinking about all of these conflicting emotions and imagining him singing the raw vocal in a studio — the state he must have gotten into to sing it.” Adjmi then started envisioning the room — what it might look like — in his mind. He was captivated by the thought of using a recording studio as a dramatic landscape. “It felt high concept in a way that my ideas usually are not,” says Adjmi, a playwright best known for “The Evildoers” and “Marie Antoinette.”…

Hulu on Disney+ Launch Mother Wolf, Hollywood APRIL 5 Bob Iger spoke of the decision to offer Hulu on Disney+. “Today, I think, consumers want not only quality, but they want volume and they want convenience,” he told Variety. “And this is now all three in one place. It’s great to have this array of great content very conveniently located instead of having to close one app and go to the other app. I think what streaming demands is a great user experience. That’s what this is aimed for.” CinemaCon Caesars Palace, Las Vegas APRIL 8-11 The annual exhibition trade show rolled out the red carpet for Hollywood’s biggest stars and C-suite executives. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo held hands during the Universal Pictures presentation as they introduced a “Wicked”…

Kenya Barris was deeply inspired by “The Cosby Show” when he created “Black-ish” in 2014. The writer and executive producer wanted to create a similarly beloved family sitcom that was expressly Black, not only with the characters, but also in the subject matter the show covered. That mission was achieved, and like “The Cosby Show,” “Black-ish” went on to spawn a TV universe that would also make an impact. “Grown-ish” was the first “Black-ish” spinoff. It has now gone six seasons and will air its 100th episode this month. Similar to “A Different World” with Lisa Bonet’s Denise Huxtable from “The Cosby Show,” “Grownish” has chronicled the college adventures of “Black-ish” characters Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) and later Andre Johnson Jr. (Marcus Scribner). “Grown-ish” has become a tentpole series for…

Dan Abrams has enjoyed a tremendously successful career, which currently includes roles as chief legal analyst at ABC News and host of NewsNation’s “Dan Abrams Live.” But he knows it was the O.J. Simpson murder trial almost 30 years ago that put him on the map — and he has complicated feelings about it. “I’ve always had a little bit of guilt about the idea that the murders of two innocent people helped start my career,” says Abrams, who was working for Court TV at the time. “But it was a legal event, and I was covering the legal story.” Abrams obviously wasn’t the only one. There has never been a media frenzy quite like the one that surrounded Simpson, a once-beloved sports icon who was accused of killing his…

When Wattpad Webtoon Studios was preparing to release the drama “Float” last year, author Kate Marchant asked for a little help from her fans. The Lionsgate film was based on her story, and now she presented three movie posters to her followers, asking them to pick their favorite. “I can feel your readers shifting in their seats,” Aron Levitz, president of Wattpad Webtoon Studios, says with a laugh. “All those creative execs are going, ‘Wait a minute, people knew about it before it went out? Are you sure that’s OK?’” For Levitz, the answer is a resounding yes. His company is shaking up the traditional approach to creating film and TV adaptations by putting the power in the hands of fans. Just last month, the third movie in the “Through…

What do Peyton Manning, Snoop Dogg, Kelly Clarkson, Mike Tirico and Jimmy Fallon have in common? This is not a joke — at least not to the leaders of NBC Universal and a small army of NBC Sports producers hunkered down at offices in Stamford, Conn., and Paris, France. ¶ The answer is the Paris Olympics, which will be telecast in the U.S. with a markedly different approach this summer. Primetime coverage will be aimed at a much broader crowd than it has for recent Olympic Games. NBCUniversal has $7.8 billion on the line in rights fees for the Games through 2032, and that nine-figure commitment is forcing the company to shore up its investment by proving that the Olympics is still a cultural juggernaut. To achieve that in today’s…

Technology has been disrupting Hollywood even longer than the L.A. district now synonymous with the entertainment business has existed. From Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention of the phonograph to the turn-of-the-19th-century introduction of the radio, followed by the VCR and the internet, businesses and business models built to serve one generation of technology have often stumbled — and sometimes toppled — when confronted with the capabilities and consumer expectations created by another. Few new technologies, however, have been quite as foundation-shaking as generative AI. Apart from the head-snapping speed at which the technology has developed, it operates on such different principles from other information technologies as to challenge the very notion of creativity, and to defy traditional concepts of authorship, identity and intellectual property. It’s posing a challenge to courts…

Challengers Director Luca Guadagnino Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes Cast Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist Distributor Amazon MGM Anyone who’s ever played tennis knows the game starts with love and escalates fast. In Luca Guadagnino’s hip, sexy and ridiculously overheated “Challengers,” the rivals are former doubles partners Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), best friends since the age of 12, who went their separate ways after both players fell for the same woman. Patrick got there first, but Art wound up marrying her — and their sense of competition has only intensified since. As bunkmates at the same tennis academy, the guys must have heard this old groaner: What do you call a girl who stands between two players on a tennis court? (The answer is almost too dumb to…