Innholdsfortegnelse for 05/29/2024 i Variety

Some naysayers thought it would be a lackluster 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. But judging by the dispatches from our team of reporters and editors on the ground in the south of France, we can assure you that Cannes still has the power to captivate. The world’s most glamorous celebration of film brought both glitter and grit, with prizes going to films including Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” and Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light.” But the Palme d’Or — bestowed by a jury led by “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig — went to Sean Baker’s “Anora,” a raucous comedy about a stripper (played by Mikey Madison) who befriends a young Russian oligarch. Indeed, it was a choice that speaks to…

Bran Stark took the Iron Throne. GoJo acquired Waystar Royco. But who will rule the Texas Renaissance Festival? That’s the battle at the center of “Ren Faire,” HBO’s new docuseries, set to air in the network’s coveted Sunday-evening slot during the two weeks ahead of “House of the Dragon” Season 2. “It sounds like that’s what their calculus was, to put it as close to that show as possible,” director Lance Oppenheim says, laughing. “Ren Faire” may have the knights and knaves of “Thrones,” but the power dynamics running through it more closely resemble “Succession.” Produced by Josh and Benny Safdie’s Elara Pictures, the three-episode doc centers on George Coulam, the iconoclastic octogenarian founder of the “nation’s largest Renaissance theme park,” which welcomes about half a million guests annually to…

In building the world of Netflix’s “Ripley,” production designer David Gropman needed to incorporate grand Italian train stations and works of art from the early 1960s. The series, shot in black and white, is based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” about a con artist named Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott), who befriends a wealthy shipping heir, Dickie Greenleaf, played by Johnny Flynn. Gropman began his plunge into designing the look of the show by studying photography books with images of the time and place. “Neo Realismo: The New Image in Italy 1932-1960” was his style bible. He further utilized work by legendary photographers Pietro Donzelli, Bert Hardy, David Seymour, Herbert List and Mario Cattaneo to help visualize what this 1960s world would look like. In particular, Gropman needed…

Historical dramas often demand a specific musical approach: Music that suggests the time and place, along with reflecting the (often real-life) characters and the unique circumstances of their lives. Five of the past season’s miniseries featured outstanding scores along these lines. For producers Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, “Masters of the Air” marked the completion of a World War II trilogy (after “Band of Brothers,” about American soldiers in Europe, and “The Pacific,” about Marines in the Pacific theater), and composer Blake Neely worked on all three. Neely orchestrated for Michael Kamen on “Band of Brothers” and was one of three composers on “The Pacific.” For “Masters of the Air,” despite his busy schedule scoring multiple CW series for producer Greg Berlanti, Neely composed, orchestrated and conducted all…

The team behind “Girls5eva” has gotten used to being texted song demos out of the blue. Series creator Meredith Scardino regularly sends music supervisor (and fellow executive producer) Jeff Richmond and his team voice memos singing her lyrics to the show’s latest absurd songs, such as “Home Alone Doorknob” or “Sweet’N Low Daddy.” By season’s end, Sara Bareilles also gets in on the fun. It is a tradition that the Grammy winner, who stars as Dawn, writes a song to emotionally punctuate each finale. In Season 1, as Dawn began to harness her own songwriting dreams, Bareilles penned an ode to imperfection with “Four Stars,” and for Season 2, she was behind the empowering anthem “Bend Not Break.” Deploying Bareilles’ soulful style is always strategic for the series, which moved…

Composer Kevin Kiner is no stranger to the world of “Star Wars” — he scored the character of Ahsoka Tano for “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and “Star Wars: Rebels.” When he learned he was going to be part of Disney+’s “Ahsoka” and he would take the former Jedi from animation to live action, he wanted audiences to understand that she was a veteran warrior. Having legacy themes from the animated shows gave him a soundscape to draw upon. He then recruited his children Sean Deana to help him score the music for the eight-part series starring Rosario Dawson. To track Ahsoka’s journey into adulthood, Kevin knew that Ahsoka’s melody would differ in that she’s a female heroine, one who has gone through a lot. “She’s had to endure things…

Located alongside a pristine alpine lake in the south of France, the Annecy Film Festival is considered a mecca by many in the animation community. It’s the kind of place you must visit at least once to meet others who worship animation. This year, DreamWorks Animation leg-end Chris Sanders (co-director of “How to Train Your Dragon” and “The Croods,” as well as Disney favorite “Lilo & Stitch”) is making the trip for the first time. Sanders plans to present an extended sample of his new feature, “The Wild Robot,” adapted from the book by Peter Brown. It’s a project that looks nothing like his previous work, even as it fulfills a dream he’s had since his hand-drawn animation days. “From the very beginning, I was concerned that people wouldn’t see…

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 Director Kevin Costner Screenplay Jon Baird, Kevin Costner Cast Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone Arriving in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, a three-hour Western directed by Kevin Costner sounded like it might be just the ticket for a perfect night of counterprogramming: a grandly scaled slice of neo-classical Hollywood. That describes the other two Westerns Costner has directed (“Dances With Wolves” and “Open Range”), and “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1,” his fourth outing as a director, gives off some of that traditional flavor. Set in 1859, the movie has stately mesa backdrops and a rousing 1950s-style musical score (by John Debney). A good portion of the film is built around the violence that erupts between settlers…

All We Imagine as Light Distributor Sideshow/Janus Indian director Payal Kapadia’s second feature is a wise, gently lambent portrait of two roommates, both Mumbai nurses, at different points in their romantic lives. Spanning the city and the seaside, an understated yet profound bond grows between them despite different ages and outlooks, and both actresses are outstanding. But it’s Kani Kusruti, playing the elderly woman facing the social and personal void left by her far-off husband, who is the breaking, mending heart of this dreamlike, daybreak-at-sunset movie. — J.K. The Apprentice Distributor N/A A spirited and entertaining docudrama about the years in which Donald Trump came to be Donald Trump. Ali Abbasi’s movie starts in 1973 and centers on the relationship between Trump (Sebastian Stan) and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the…

TV audiences tracked down “Tracker” in a big way this season. The freshman CBS drama, which stars Justin Hartley as a survivalist who helps law enforcement and others solve tough cases, was the 2023-24 TV season’s most-watched entertainment series. According to the Eye network, that’s the first time a first-year TV series was ranked as the No. 1 show since “Survivor” premiered as an instant phenomenon in 2000 (and that was a summer show, so there’s an asterisk on that one). “Tracker” was helped, of course, by premiering in February behind Super Bowl LVIII — giving it a huge jump start. And this was an unusual, truncated TV season due to the Hollywood strikes, which meant limited episodic orders for most programs. Last year’s top-rated show, Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone,” hasn’t…

Gracie Awards Beverly Wilshire, Beverly Hills MAY 21 Kristen Wiig presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to her “Palm Royale” co-star Carol Burnett at the Alliance of Women in Media Foundation gala. “As the little me watched ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ in awe, the first creative seeds were planted,” Wiig said. “So, Carol, in many ways it’s like you’re my oldest friend.” Then she cracked, “But also you are my oldest friend.” Age was also on the mind of the 91-year-old comedian when she spoke of the event’s namesake. “I was unfortunately, believe it or not, too young to have met the legendary Gracie Allen,” Burnett said. “But I hope we might have had something, or maybe a lot, in common. Her iconic work as an artist paved the way for…

There is a wealth of period costumes across the categories for Emmy voters to think about this season. In limited series, Oscar-winner Colleen Atwood built 200 to 300 leather jackets for AppleTV+’s World War II drama “Masters of the Air.” “It took six months to get them built,” Atwood says. Procuring the right elements was a global process that included getting era-specific zippers from Japan and sheepskin from Scotland and England. Atwood also explained the unconventional aging process of the garments, saying that “once they were built, we had to shear the inside so they weren’t as thick, and then we put them in a vat of rocks inside a cement mixer to beat the leather up.” “Shōgun” costume designer Carlos Rosario built over 2,000 costumes for the 10-part limited…

Variety’s A Night With Artisans re-turns for Emmy season in Los Angeles on May 30. A Night With Artisans celebrates the crafts of those who help tell the visual story, as artisans from top contenders dive into and share their processes on everything from production design to makeup and costumes. Variety’s senior artisans editor Jazz Tangcay will moderate the discussions on innovation and technique. Now in its second year, the night will be split into two panels: Creative Collaborators and Makeup, Hair and Costume Design. Each will highlight artisans behind such shows as “Masters of the Air,” “Palm Royale,” “Hacks,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” “3 Body Problem,” “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” “Apples Never Fall,” “Lessons in Chemistry,” “The Morning Show” and more. “A Night With Artisans is such a wonderful event,”…

Science fiction and fantasy have inspired dozens of great television scores through the years, from “Battlestar Galactica” to “Game of Thrones.” Three more streaming series continued that tradition this TV season: “Silo,” “Fallout” and “3 Body Problem.” Atli Örvarsson’s music for “Silo,” the Apple TV+ dystopian drama set in a bleak future where everyone lives in underground silos, was initially inspired by the setting. “It’s a mechanized world,” he says. “The technology you see is very, very old; the computers look like they’re from the ’80s, so there was always this idea that even the electronic sounds should be primitive, not slick.” So he relied on Korg and Moog synthesizers from earlier eras, along with an unusual keyboard: the magnetic resonator piano, which uses electromagnets to create unusual sounds from…

“The Regime” showrunner Stephen Frears is a man of few words when it comes to music — at least according to award-winning composer Alexandre Desplat. But that wasn’t a bad thing. The two had previously collaborated, and Desplat liked that approach, as it gave him free reign to come up with compositions that he could bring back to the director. Recruited for HBO’s “The Regime,” starring Kate Winslet as the chancellor who reigns over an unnamed Central European country, Desplat looked to Winslet’s acting, design and costumes for inspiration. “The music needed to be charged with humor, but not too much,” he says. “There also needed to be an ominous presence. There’s something uncomfortable about these people. They’re almost sad, and they’re crazy and unique, so the music had to…

With breakout hits like “Big City Greens,” “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder” and “Phineas and Ferb,” Disney Television Animation has been setting the gold standard in kids’ animation for 40 years. DTVA was formed on the heels of challenging outcomes with features “The Fox and the Hound” and “The Black Cauldron.” Initially, DTVA was restricted from using established Disney legacy characters, but nevertheless had huge successes with new shows like “The Wiggles” and “Adventures of the Gummi Bears,” both of which became popular in syndication. As time went on, DTVA was able to use its limited rights to create shows like “Duck-Tales” and “Tale Spin,” which featured Disney characters. Today, the slate has evolved to include shows that travel across Disney’s streaming, linear and digital platforms, including Disney+, Disney…

The animation world gathers in the lakeside French town of Annecy in early June to meet, greet, network and celebrate the art form. In addition to screening animated features and shorts from all over the world, Hollywood studios are making the trip in support of high-profile projects. Paramount Animation and Hasbro will unveil “Transformers One” in the Screening Events section of the festival. The first animated “Transformers” movie since the 1986 original, “Transformers One” boasts an all-star voice cast of Chris Hemsworth as Orion Pax and Brian Tyree-Henry as D-16 — and how those close-knit robots became Optimus Prime and Megatron, and became enemies. Josh Cooley directs the film, scheduled to be released Sept. 20. Illumination will continue a popular tradition by hosting a special screening of “Despicable Me 4”…

Eric Platform Netflix Premiere date May 30 Episodes 6 Creator Abi Morgan Cast Benedict Cumberbatch, Gaby Hoffmann, McKinley Belcher III In Netflix’s limited series “Eric,” from screenwriter Abi Morgan (“Shame,” “The Hour”), famed puppeteer Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his wife, Cassie (Gaby Hoff-mann), are forced to grapple with what-ifs when their 9-year-old son, Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe), vanishes. While Cassie leans on the NYPD and Missing Persons Squad detective Michael Ledroit (a compelling McKinley Belcher III), Vincent begins to unravel. Desperate to find Edgar, he grows increasingly volatile as he becomes obsessed with his son’s drawings of a monster puppet named Eric. Though Vincent is convinced Edgar will return home if he can bring Eric to life, the show goes beyond the anguish of missing person cases. “Eric” forces…

Apple misread the room Long seen as the gold standard in marketing, the tech giant did a face-plant with its ad for the new iPad Pro tablet. The 60-second spot shows a massive hydraulic press literally crushing an array of objects — including a record player, a piano, a guitar, an old TV set, cameras, a typewriter, books, paint cans and tubes, and a classic arcade machine — and compressing them into (voilà!) the ultrathin iPad Pro. “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create,” Apple CEO Tim Cook cheerily posted on X along with the ad. The commercial was meant to be whimsical and clever. It was instantly panned. “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley,” actor Hugh Grant posted on X. “Disgusting,” a…

Back in 2017, a little red debit card was the hottest ticket in town. One swipe of a Movie-Pass membership card gave access to daily movie tickets at a staggeringly low monthly subscription rate of $9.95. And the concept promised to redefine the future of moviegoing. Subscriptions exploded, the company’s stock soared and investors rushed to get in on the venture. But the deal was, as skeptics suspected, too good to be true: MoviePass lost $150 million in 2017, and ultimately shuttered in 2019. It’s tempting to chalk up the failure to an unsustainable business model. Yet the new HBO documentary “MoviePass, MovieCrash,” which premieres May 29, aims to paint a clearer picture of just what went wrong. “There’s a story under the story,” Stacy Spikes, who co-founded MoviePass with…

Janine (Quinta Brunson) has taken on a fellowship in the school district, and she and Gregory (Tyler James Williams) put their relationship on pause — due to mixed signals. Overall, the teachers are maturing and growing. “Abbott Elementary” artisans worked to reflect that growth through their respective crafts in the ABC series’ junior year. In the first two seasons, Janine’s wardrobe was mainly long skirts paired with turtlenecks. According to series costume designer Susan Michalek, the idea was that her clothes were baggy. “We never did fittings to make the clothes fit. They were just last minute and let’s put a belt on it.” In Season 3, her character takes on more job responsibilities, and “the clothing is fitted. She has shorter skirts.” Michalek notes that as the season progresses,…

Some imperfect iPhone video shot by retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly while he was commander of the International Space Station was the primary source of inspiration behind the visual style of the space-set scenes in Apple TV+’s “Constellation.” As the sci-fi series begins, astronaut Jo, played by Noomi Rapace, survives a disaster at the ISS and returns to Earth to find that things are not the same; Kelly was a key advisor on the ambitious production. Director of photography Markus Förderer (“Red Notice”) relates that after seeing Kelly’s video, the team aimed to “replicate” as close as possible “that feel of a camera operator floating in zero gravity but it being handheld and grounded — and not like it was shot [on] a crane.” This was achieved, he says, by…

Music for drama can take on various styles and colors, as demonstrated by three of this year’s most talked-about miniseries. Jeff Russo spent two and a half years thinking about, and composing, the score for “Ripley,” Steven Zaillian’s eight-part thriller about a sociopath (Andrew Scott) who finds the high life in 1960s Italy worth killing for. “Every piece of music I wrote was related to Tom Ripley,” the Emmy winner for “Fargo” says of the Netflix series. “It all had to do with Tom’s state of mind. We’re in Tom’s head — the tension that he feels, the off-kilter feeling that he feels, or the sinister aspect of what he’s feeling.” Zaillian gave Russo the key: Don’t start with Episode 1, start with Episode 7, as the Italian police are…

Laura Karpman brought choral sounds into Season 2 of “What If…?” while Natalie Holt re-established the “Loki” theme for the series’ second season. The Newton Brothers entered the Marvel universe by scoring “X-Men ’97,” and Kris Bowers dives into “Secret Invasion.” These are among the composers of Marvel TV shows vying for Emmy consideration. Despite telling different stories, each composer worked to bring a score that felt big, epic and exciting — exactly what fans and audiences expect from a Marvel TV show. Holt knew Season 2 of “Loki” would be darker and that the titular character (Tom Hiddleston) ascending to the throne and becoming a brand-new god. “I knew where it was heading at the end of Episode 6, so I had this idea of an old Norse choir…

As the animation community deals with industry contraction, one force inspires more fear and uncertainty than any other: Artificial intelligence. The Annecy Festival will screen four works using AI after receiving dozens of submissions that used the technology. Whether it’s concern that AI will make some animation jobs obsolete or replace humans altogether, there’s discussion about what it will mean not only for artistry but also workflow. Some see AI as a tool to be mastered and carefully applied as issues surrounding copyright, creation and overall use are sorted out. With all the questions AI raises, they view it as just another technological evolution. As one generation of artists had to contend with Photoshop and what it meant for digital imaging, this wave of artists will have to learn how…

First-time feature film director Kelsey Mann dug deep into his own emotions while making “Inside Out 2.” As he imagined a story about the confusing journey we all go on through puberty, he knew he would need to add new emotions to the ones from the first animated hit — so Anxiety, Envy, Ennui and Embarrassment join the fray in main character Riley’s developing mind. At the Annecy Animation Festival, Mann will appear at a special screening of the Pixar film June 14 and will serve as Disney Art Challenge jury president. The theme of this year’s event will be “Adolescence: So many emotions.” He spoke to Variety about the new film. This was your first feature film. How was it to sit in the director’s chair? This is the…