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The HBO limited series "Band of Brothers" was the most expensive television miniseries at the time, recreating the American military unit Easy Company's European activities during World War II. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, the series provided an expansive and factually grounded account of American combat involvement in Western Europe during the war. Like Spielberg and Hanks' previous collaboration, the award-winning "Saving Private Ryan," "Band of Brothers" was praised for its stellar cast, realistic action, and expert attention towards historical authenticity. The series still sets the bar of quality for military shows, of any conflict, though there are a number of similar shows fans should check out next.

Whether it's other HBO television productions examining various harrowing wars or long-running shows where wartime skirmishes punctuate every episode, there are countless military shows available. The best in the genre strive towards the same level of quality and...

Exclusive: Daughters, the award-winning Netflix documentary set behind the walls of a Washington DC prison, will serve as the closing night selection of a new film festival taking place at California’s San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

The film, winner of the Festival Favorite Award as well as the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary at Sundance, centers on a special “Daddy-Daughter Dance” where incarcerated men and their daughters participate in a unique and emotional bonding experience. It will screen October 11 at the San Quentin Film Festival, a two-day event on the grounds of the prison that houses upwards of 4,000 men.

‘Daughters’

“We are honored to have Daughters screen as the Closing Night film in San Quentin!” said Natalie Rae, who directed the documentary with Angela Patton. “To connect incarcerated fathers...

The San Quentin Film Festival — the first-ever film festival held inside a prison — has named its inaugural industry jury, which includes Jeffrey Wright, Billy Crudup, Mary-Louise Parker and more.

The festival, taking place Oct. 10 and 11 at the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in northern California, will highlight short films and pitches from current and formerly incarcerated filmmakers in front of a jury made up of entertainment industry artists and executives. Separately, an “inside jury” made up of currently incarcerated people will judge narrative and documentary feature films about the prison experience made by filmmakers who have never served prison time.

Actors on the industry jury include Wright, Crudup, Parker and Kathy Najimy.

Directors on the jury include Elegance Bratton, Taylor Hackford, Lynn Novick, Greg Kwedar, Jeff Stanzler and Joe Talbot.

Writer-producers on the jury include Sam Catlin, Lawrence O’Donnell, Piper Kerman (“Orange Is the New Black”) and J.T. Rogers.

The jury also includes Len Amato,...

Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change based on buzz and events. Predictions are updated every Thursday.

Visit the prediction pages for the respective ceremonies via the links below:

Oscars | Emmys | Grammys | Tonys

2023 Emmy Predictions:

Outstanding Documentary of Nonfiction (Series) “Harry & Meghan” was directed by Liz Garbus.

Weekly Commentary: A tight race ensues for acclaimed documentaries. Ken Burns’ powerful “The U.S. and the Holocaust” which premiered at Telluride 2022 before hitting television screens, is a favorite in the category.

Read: Variety’s...

Documentary Or Nonfiction Series

100 Foot Wave (HBO)

100 Foot Wave (HBO)

Chris Smith’s program about big-wave surfers is nominated for the second consecutive year (it won for cinematography last year). Season two features half as many episodes but still earned six noms — twice as many as the category’s next highest finishers.

The 1619 Project (Hulu)

The 1619 Project (Hulu)

Nikole Hannah-Jones and Oprah Winfrey exec produced this adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning New York Times feature about the role of racism in U.S. history. While certainly hitting the zeitgeist, it’s one of only two nominees without a directing or writing nom.

Dear Mama (FX/Hulu)

Dear Mama (FX/Hulu)

Allen Hughes’ series shares never-before-released audio and video of Tupac Shakur and his mom. Having bowed in May, more recently than any other nominee, it has a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score but is tied for a category...

Most festivals don’t want protests. This one encouraged a picket line to form.

The Nantucket Film Festival, which took place June 21-26 on the foggy isle 30 miles off the Massachusetts coast, is uniquely oriented toward the craft of screenwriting. Stars certainly appear — Allison Williams brought the glamour this year — but pen and paper are more important here than primping and pompadours.

The WGA has been a longtime partner of the festival, and the biggest gala event was a Screenwriters Tribute honoring Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the “To All the Boys I Loved Before” scribe Jenny Han, and Nicole Holofcener, whose “You Hurt My Feelings” screened in the lineup. That film is literally about an author, and so were several others that showed, including Christian Petzold’s “Afire.” And the biggest competition isn’t built around established names at all, but a screenplay contest geared toward finding new talent.

During a recent Gold Derby video interview, news and features editor Ray Richmond spoke in-depth with Ken Burns about the three-part, six-hour documentary film he co-produced and co-directed for PBS, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” which is eligible at the 2023 Emmy Awards. Watch the full video above and read the complete interview transcript below.

“I will never work on a more important film than this one,” declares Burns of “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the film documentary he co-produced and co-directed (with frequent collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein) and released last September. Coming from Burns, that’s a mouthful, considering he is perhaps the most celebrated documentarian of our time and the foremost chronicler of the American experience. He’s a filmmaker who is responsible for many of the most treasured nonfiction series and biographies ever put to film, among them “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Jackie Robinson” and “The Vietnam War.

Documentarian Emily Wachtel met Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward when she was two years old. They were neighbors in Westport. Conn, the dearest of family friends. “I knew them my whole life,” says Wachtel. “They are the reason I am in film.”

Wachtel, producer of CNN Films for Max’s six-part docuseries “The Last Movie Stars,” which paints a sweeping, intimate, romantic portrait of the life, love and careers of Newman and Woodward, describes her childhood with the famed couple as if something out of a suburban New England dream.

“They were incredible people,” says Wachtel. “I was so young when I met them, and I didn’t understand what a movie star was at the time. But part of that is because they were so real. They’d pick you up to go to birthday parties, Joanne made sweaters. They had this big, beautiful barn on the property and...

President Franklin Roosevelt, in a moment of fury and exasperation a year before America entered the Second World War, confided in Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this,” Fdr said. “I am absolutely convinced Charles Lindbergh is a Nazi.” That is one of many shattering moments in “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” an enthralling, seven-hour PBS docuseries directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein.

Sarah Botstein, Lynn Novick and Ken Burns

This is an incredibly knotty, intricate and frustrating part of history, and as directors, you seem to really lean into the maddening quality of it. Is that accurate?

Ken Burns It is very frustrating to watch because you can understand how, retrospectively, the simplistic among us might say, “The Holocaust happened and there must be an American responsible.” So a lot of the blame goes to Fdr when,...

“I will never work on a more important film than this one,” declares Ken Burns of “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the three-part, six-hour PBS film he co-produced and co-directed (with frequent collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein) and released last September. Coming from Burns, that’s a mouthful, considering he is perhaps the most celebrated documentarian of our time and the foremost chronicler of the American experience. He’s a filmmaker who is responsible for many of the most treasured nonfiction series and biographies ever put to film, among them “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Jackie Robinson” and “The Vietnam War.” A two-time Oscar nominee and five-time Emmy winner, Burns is without peer on the documentary production stage. And he is as proud of “U.S. and the Holocaust” as anything he’s ever done in his four-decade filmmaking career. Watch the exclusive video interview above.

What Burns – a...

The 2023 Nantucket Film Festival, running June 21-26, with kick off with four films on its opening day lineup. For the 12th consecutive year, a Disney and Pixar movie will open the festival with “Elemental,” which premieres in May at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Also on Day 1 are Sophie Barthes’ “The Pod Generation,” coming off stops at Sundance and Sarasota — Barthes will also receive the inaugural Maria Mitchell Visionary Award for the film; SXSW-premiere documentary “Joan Baez I am a Noise,” with Baez herself in attendance; and Austrian documentary “Patrick and the Whale,” which premiered at TIFF 2022.

Recent Bleecker Street acquisition “Jules,” starring Ben Kingsley, Harriet Sansom Harris, and Jane Curtin, will be the closing-night film.

Guests announced to be in attendance include Michaela Watkins (“You Hurt My Feelings”), Allison Williams (“M3GAN”), Lola Tung (“The Summer I Turned Pretty”), Graham Greene (“Dances with Wolves”), and Julio Torres (“Problemista”).

Other films...

“I’m Jewish, and I thought I knew a fair amount about this topic, and it was revelatory to find out how much I didn’t know, especially about the American side of the story,” admits Lynn Novick, the co-producer and co-director (along with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein) of the powerful three-part PBS documentary film “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” What Novick and the filmmakers discovered in their deep and impeccable research was that the long-held assumption that Americans helped save the world from Nazism and totalitarianism and were in fact liberators is true only up to a point. During the late 1930s and ’40s, the United States was as guilty of turning its back on Jewish refugees and their brethren being slaughtered by the millions in Europe during Hitler’s industrial-scale program of extermination. Watch the exclusive video interview above.

“I had this idea going in that for Americans,...

Ken Burns, Steve McQueen, Helena Bonham Carter Holocaust Docs To Feature On BBC

Holocaust documentaries from Ken Burns, Steve McQueen and Helena Bonham Carter will feature on the BBC to mark Holocaust Memorial Day later this month. Burns’ The U.S. and the Holocaust is part of a package of shows that will air on BBC Four and iPlayer as the annual commemoration rolls around. The three-parter is a PBS original from Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, examining how the American people and their leaders responded to one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the Bonham Carter-narrated Three Minutes: A Lengthening from the Storyville strand sees three minutes of footage of a Polish ghetto lengthened to tell the hidden stories behind it. The film is co-produced by McQueen, directed by Bianca Stiger and footage filmed by David Kurtz. The BBC has also commissioned its own...

Adios, Ava!

Tamara Braun’s nearly two-year run as Days of Our Lives‘ Ava will end… well, today, Dec. 20, she confirmed on Instagram.

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“Hey all you Days fans!! If you want to see Ava off, tune into Dool today for her last day in Salem,” the two-time Daytime Emmy winner wrote on Tuesday, alongside a video montage of BTS memories. “Thanks for all the love and support you continue to show me.”

Ready for more of today’s newsy nuggets?...

Plot: Two World War I veterans, a doctor (Christian Bale) and a lawyer (John David Washington), are hired by the daughter of their former commanding officer to prove the man was murdered. Soon framed for murder, the two are reunited with the nurse (Margot Robbie) that was devoted to them after the war and stumble upon a Fascist plot to replace the president of the United States.

Review: A lot is going on in David O. Russell’s Amsterdam. The early reviews have been largely negative, with many criticizing the movie’s loose, sometimes shambling and uneasy mix of genres. However, if you can get over the off-putting tone, which ranges from slapstick comedy one moment to bursts of gory ultra-violence the next, you’ll find Amsterdam is an ambitious and entertaining film.

Believe it or not, the plot of Amsterdam, which relates to a Fascist plot to take over the United States government,...

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When directors Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein began work on The U.S. and the Holocaust around 2015, some of the events the three-part historical documentary series would depict hadn’t even happened yet.

Initially, the series was inspired by questions viewers had for filmmakers including Burns after the release of The War (2007) and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014), as well as an invitation by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to work on a companion film to their exhibition, “Americans and the Holocaust.” The idea was to ask, what did the U.S. know about the Holocaust and when, and what should the U.S. have done about it? But as Burns, Novick and Botstein got down to work answering those questions over the course of the next seven years, their story began to resonate loudly with current events. Ultimately, before the series premiered on Sept.

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“We’d rather march to hear Willkie on national unity than be marched into a concentration camp,” Harry Warner firmly stated in the summer of 1941. The mogul was responding to criticism for his encouraging studio employees to attend a rally at the Hollywood Bowl featuring 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, a strong advocate for U.S. intervention in World War II. That same summer, a competing rally was held at the Hollywood Bowl on behalf of the America First movement. The keynote speaker was famed aviator and eugenics enthusiast Charles Lindbergh. The same aviator who, at an America First rally in Des Moines on Sept. 11, 1941, argued that one of the biggest threats to the United States was the Jewish-controlled media. Lindbergh’s hate-fueled rhetoric is covered at length in the new PBS docuseries, The U.S. and the Holocaust, produced by Ken Burns,...

Click here to read the full article.

It would make me happy, or at least relieved, to report that Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein’s new PBS documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust was inessential viewing — that this six-hour cautionary tale about what happens when the United States fails to live up to its humanitarian ideals both domestically and on a global stage just didn’t have anything fresh or relevant to say.

Unfortunately, at a moment at which “America First” rhetoric and anti-immigrant, anti-refugee sentiment remain fervent, as one state after another uses coded language to outlaw the teaching of any piece of our history that dares to deviate from a discernibly false narrative of American exceptionalism, The U.S. and the Holocaust stands as one of the most vital projects in Burns’ five-decade relationship with PBS.

Smartly constructed and packed with avenues for future research and investigation,...

Viewers are bound to be shocked while watching Ken Burns’ three-part, six-hour look at The U.S. and the Holocaust, an American tragedy that played out against a distant, victorious World War II. But the gasps may have less to do with seeing somewhat familiar concentration camp images and more with taking in historical facts uncovered through time and dogged research. “Many of us think we understand the Holocaust,” says Sarah Botstein, who co-directed and produced the series with Burns and Lynn Novick. “But many Americans don’t understand the deep-seated seeds of American anti-Semitism and how that dovetails with…the persecution of Jews of Europe.” (Credit: Courtesy of Library of Congress/PBS) While the U.S. permitted some 225,000 immigrants fleeing Nazi persecution, hundreds of thousands couldn’t enter, despite images of Nazi terror in newspapers and newsreels. And why? Poll after poll showed Americans opposed more immigration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt...

The Telluride Film Festival’s emphasis on documentary has not wavered in recent years. But the prominence of nonfiction fare at the 49th edition has arguably made this year’s Telluride the autumn Sundance, where some of the biggest buzz is for docs.

The lineup, kept under wraps until the eve of the fest’s opening on Sept. 2, includes 16 docs from novice and veteran documentarians, including Steve James (“A Compassionate Spy”), Matthew Heineman (“Retrograde”), Chris Smith (“Sr.”) Ondi Timoner (“Last Flight Home”) and Ryan White (“Good Night Oppy”). (Additional “secret” screenings have yet to be announced.)

The rising level of documentaries at the Colorado fest is largely due to the influence of Telluride executive director Julie Huntsinger.

“This year, there is almost parity with the narrative features in the [main feature] program,” says Huntsinger, who co-directs Telluride with Tom Luddy. “It’s not us actively seeking it. For lack of a better word,...

The world premieres of Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light,” Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” and Sebastian Lelio’s “The Wonder” will take place at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival, which announced its lineup on Thursday, one day before the festival begins.

Other notable films in the Telluride lineup include Alejandro G. Inarritu’s “Bardo,” Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones and All,” Todd Field’s “TÁR” and James Gray’s “Armageddon Time,” which are making their North American debuts after premiering at European festivals.

Among the documentaries heading to Telluride, premieres are Steve James’ “A Compassionate Spy,” Anton Corbijn’s “Squaring the Circle,” Ryan White’s “Good Night Oppy,” Mary McCartney’s “If These Walls Could Sing” and Eva Webber’s “Merkel.”

Also Read:

TIFF 2022 Lineup: Films From Tyler Perry, Peter Farrelly, Sam Mendes and Catherine Hardwicke to Premiere

Documentary director and film historian Mark Cousins will have two films at the festival,...

Telluride Film Festival’s official 2022 lineup has been announced, revealing world premieres of Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light,” Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking,” Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Sebastián Lelio’s “The Wonder.”

In its 49th year, the festival will pay tribute to two-time Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, whose new film “TÁR,” from director Todd Field, will debut stateside after premiering at the Venice Film Festival.

In addition, the festival will also tribute Academy Award nominee Polley (adapted screenplay for 2006’s “Away from Her”) and acclaimed documentarian Marc Cousins, who has two films dropping at the fest. One is “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock,” which is based on a fictional monologue between Cousins and the master of suspense. The other is “The March on Rome,” depicting the ascent of fascism in Europe during the 1930s.

Other Venice bows heading over to the Colorado Mountains are Luca Guadagnino’s...

In 1973 Chol Soo Lee, a 21-year-old Korean immigrant, was wrongfully incarcerated for the murder of a Chinatown gang leader. He became a symbol for systemic injustice against Asian Americans and spurred solidarity within his community. His prison memoirs have been adapted into a book and his case inspired the 1989 drama film “True Believer.” But his life — what happened before and after he became famous for his imprisonment — was far from a Hollywood fairy tale.

In the documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee,” first-time doc directors Julie Ha and Eugene Yi use archival materials in an attempt to present their tragic hero in all three dimensions. Despite their efforts, Soo Lee feels just out of reach, but the story of his life remains as important as it is horrifying.

The film opens by explaining the crime and how Soo Lee became a prime suspect. Journalistic giant K.W. Lee compared Soo Lee’s...

How’s this for a timely announcement: Elon Musk, aka Twitter’s new owner, will be the subject of the next installment in the documentary film series The New York Times Presents.

“Elon Musk’s Crash Course,” premiering Friday, May 20 at 10 pm Pt simultaneously on FX and Hulu, focuses on Musk’s claims about Tesla’s self-driving technology.

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After exploring “The Civil War,” “Baseball” and “Country Music,” award-winning documentarian Ken Burns and his frequent collaborator Lynn Novick examined the importance of being Ernest Hemingway in their three-part PBS documentary “Hemingway.” Premiering in April to strong reviews and Emmys buzz, the series weaves Papa’s biography with excerpts from his fiction, non-fiction, and personal correspondence. The series also reviews the mythology around the larger-than-life Hemingway, who penned such classic novels as “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Old Man and the Sea,” to reveal the truth behind the bravado.

Feature film adaptations of Hemingway’s works had mixed results. Hemingway Bff Gary Cooper excelled in 1932’s “A Farewell to Arms” and 1943’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” receiving an Oscar nomination for the latter. John Garfield gave one of his strongest performance in 1950’s superb noir “The Breaking Point,” based...

Theaters may be reopening, but physical media is forever — Alonso Duralde spotlights the best new DVDs and Blu-rays

New Indie

Peter Sarsgaard and Rashida Jones make a somewhat unusual couple in “The Sound of Silence” (IFC Films), a somewhat unusual film. And it’s not that Sarsgaard and Jones don’t have chemistry to burn; it’s that the movie operates at its own pace while diving deeply into the Sarsgaard character’s obsessions with the thrums and throbs and vibrations of our day-to-day lives. He “tunes” his clients’ New York City apartments, looking for the sounds (whether they’re on the outside or coming from household appliances) that are disturbing the tenants, and Jones plays a social worker who turns to him for his unique services. Somewhere between “The Conversation” and last year’s “Sound of Metal,” it’s a uniquely eccentric tale that might make you pay more...

Continuing their attempts to chronicle every foundational moment or figure in American history, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s exhaustive six-hour documentary, “Hemingway,” traces the historical formation of the titular author. Utilizing Burns’s now routine formal devices – photo pans and zooms, talking heads, Peter Coyote narration – “Hemingway” grafts the author’s life onto his novels in ways that may trouble literary critics who have moved on from biographical criticism but will be captivating for fans of Burns’ particular form of reporting.

Continue reading ‘Hemingway’: Ken Burns’ Latest Is An Exhaustive Look At White Male Authorship [Review] at The Playlist.

In the beginning of the end for Ernest Hemingway, as a 1954 trip to Africa is called in the new PBS documentary “Hemingway,” the great American novelist breaks his skull for the second time in his life during a plane crash in the outback.

Trapped as flames spread to the cabin, Hemingway is forced to use his head as a battering ram to create an opening in the twisted metal of the plane’s wreckage.

It’s the last of at least five major concussive head injuries that Hemingway sustained throughout his adult life and punctuates a growing problem. This time, his symptoms include slurred speech, double-vision and recurring deafness.

The Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway features two themes — his fascination with shotguns and his many concussions — that foreshadow what’s to come. Hemingway was long assumed to have suffered from a mental illness such as biploar depression, exacerbated by his...

(Welcome to The Quarantine Stream, a series where the /Film team shares what they’ve been watching while social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic.) The Movie: Hemingway Where You Can Stream It: PBS The Pitch: A six-hour, three-part documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that explores the life and work of Ernest Hemingway. Why It’s Essential Quarantine Viewing: Ernest Hemingway […]

The post The Quarantine Stream: ‘Hemingway’ Strives to Deconstruct the Self-Created Myth of Ernest Hemingway appeared first on /Film.

Ernest Hemingway means different things to different people. To some, he’s little more than a name on a required reading list in school, one of those white males whose work makes up the canon of Western literature. To others (and thanks to “10 Things I Hate About You”) he was an “abusive, alcoholic misogynist.” As directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick lay out in their six-hour documentary for PBS, “Hemingway,” he was all of those things.

Per Burns’ reputation for thoroughness, “Hemingway” is one of the most comprehensive examinations of the man and the myth around him. Each episode, clocking in at nearly two hours over each of three episodes, isn’t just a historical biography of Hemingway’s life and relationships. It’s also an exploration of his writing process, how his life influenced his art, and a critical reexamination of how his literary endeavors hold up in...

How impressive is Ken Burns as a documentarian? Think of it like this: In the 1980s, the Brooklyn-born filmmaker earned Oscar nominations for making compelling docs on the history of a pair of inanimate objects. Granted, “Brooklyn Bridge” and “The Statue of Liberty” were films on America’s strength and exceptionalism as much as they were on the landmarks themselves, but those early projects set Burns on a path to utilize the same kind of majestic storytelling to connect with human subjects, whether dead or alive.

From founding father and U.S. President Thomas Jefferson to celebrated humorist Mark Twain to the wrongly convicted Central Park Five, Burns builds on these legacies by also taking the pulse of the entire nation at the time through comprehensive reporting and a respect for the facts that might be skimmed over by other directors with less time to afford. Even when he was...

We’ve spent a year inside watching our televisions and, as the world opens up and the weather warms, most of us are eager to step out a bit. That makes the entertainment industry’s job that much harder. It’s one thing to compete against other shows and movies, but how do you compete with the world at large after a year of isolation?

Fortunately, audiences can’t stay outside all the time. Even more fortunate: this April is bringing a lot of promising offerings to screens small and large,...

In today’s TV news roundup, Netflix announced the docuseries “Amend: The Fight for America,” and Peacock released a trailer for its continuation of the hit ’80s sitcom “Punky Brewster.”

Dates

Netflix announced the six-part docuseries “Amend: The Fight for America” will premiere on Feb. 17. Executive produced and hosted by Will Smith, each hour-long episode will explore American history through a lens that will have its viewers questioning what a “United States” really means. Terence Carter, Jana Babatunde-Bey, Jamal Watson, Tom Yellin, Robe Imbriano, Jonna Mclaughlin, Angus Wall, Larry Wilmore also executive produce. Watch a trailer below.

Allblk announced that their six-episode original sitcom “Millennials” will begin premiering weekly on Feb. 25. Centered on the lives of four 20-something roommates and their neighbors across the hall, the new comedy follows them navigating the chaos of being young and finding success in the city of angels. “Millennials” stars Kyle Massey, Keraun Harris,...

Directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are promising a “nuanced” portrait of Ernest Hemingway in their three-part, six-hour documentary on the Nobel Prize-winning author coming to PBS in April.

Speaking at the PBS Winter Press Tour session Tuesday, Burns said the film deconstructs Hemingway’s image as a “hyper-masculine” archetype. “We were drawn at trying to get at a real Hemingway and I think the persona of the wild man, the drunk, the bar guy, the big game hunter, the big sea fisherman is sort of what we inherit, the baggage we carry. But almost immediately we began to see how thin and frail that was, not just for him but in fact.”

“The public persona…became such a burden for him, Novick noted. “And it becomes kind of exhausting, someone said in the film, to be Hemingway after a while. So it was especially wonderful to discover him young...

In today’s TV news roundup, Netflix has released the official trailer for “The Playbook,” a docuseries produced by LeBron James, and TBS announced John Cena and Nicole Byer as the hosts of “Wipeout.”

Casting

Shudder, AMC Networks‘ horror streaming service, announced that Anna Camp, Keith David, Ashley Laurence, Josh McDermitt and Adam Pally will star in episodes of the second season of its anthology series “Creepshow“ directed by executive producer and showrunner Greg Nicotero. The six-episode season just began production in Atlanta, Ga. and is set to premiere in 2021. The show’s first season broke Shudder’s records for number of viewers, new subscriber sign-ups and total minutes streamed, becoming the most-watched show in Shudder’s history. “Creepshow” is produced by The Cartel with Monster Agency Productions, Taurus Entertainment and Striker Entertainment.

TBS announced John Cena and Nicole Byer as the hosts of the revival of competition series “Wipeout,...

Nicolas Cage will be wrangling big cats at Amazon Studios: The scripted series starring the Oscar winner as Tiger King‘s Joe Exotic has landed at Amazon Prime’s production arm, where it is currently in development, our sister site Variety reports.

As previously reported in May, the eight-episode project is based on the Texas Monthly article “Joe Exotic: A Dark Journey Into the World of a Man Gone Wild,” which was published several months before Netflix’s buzzy docuseries dropped. It will center on the eccentric zookeeper Joe Schreibvogel, better known as “Joe Exotic,” who fights to keep...

Former incarcerated student Jule Hall knows the power of prison education.

“When I was in BPI [Bard Prison Initiative], I saw guys who were into everything negative, but when they got to BPI they became some of the most articulate and engaged people,” Hall said in an interview with IndieWire.

The Bard Prison Initiative isn’t just changing how we see college in prison, but how we see the incarcerated people themselves. The PBS and Emmy-nominated documentary “College Behind Bars” seeks to showcase the students of BPI as well as the need for more prison college programs throughout the country.

“We all have these preconceptions and assumptions about people,” director Lynn Novick said — and she was no different.

The journey to bring “College Behind Bars” started in 2012, when Novick and producer Sarah Botstein were invited to give a lecture for BPI students. Neither had been in a maximum security prison before and were...

Editors’ Note: With acknowledgment of the big-picture implications of a pandemic that has claimed thousands of lives, cratered global economies and closed international borders, Deadline’s Coping With Covid-19 Crisis series is a forum for those in the entertainment space grappling with myriad consequences of seeing a great industry screech to a halt. The hope is for an exchange of ideas and experiences, and suggestions on how businesses and individuals can best ride out a crisis that doesn’t look like it will abate any time soon.

While U.S. prisons face the terrifying and inescapable threat of Covid-19 within their walls, vital education resources for the incarcerated have been horribly impacted—a situation documentary filmmaker Lynn Novick and Jule Hall, a graduate of the Bard College Prison Initiative (BPI), want to highlight here.

Novick’s PBS docuseries College Behind Bars focused on the...

There’s an alien nature to the scores of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Even when the pair’s compositions are connecting with the rawest of human emotions, there’s a way that these two longtime collaborators have embraced a kind of outsider approach to film music and made it more accessible.

2019 saw Reznor and Ross contribute to “Waves” and “Watchmen,” two stories that diverge in more than just the usual film/TV divide. One is an intimate family portrait set in the suburbs of South Florida while the other traverses nearly a century of institutional oppression through the lens of one Oklahoma city. Where the musical expression of that pain and uncertainty typically is the province of a robust string section or a mournful piano solo, Reznor and Ross are part of a generation that’s helping to use that same language to adapt to an increasingly digital age.

When you watch College Behind Bars, which began last night on PBS and concludes tonight, or any other documentary like it, please don’t say that it “humanizes” the people who are photographed. Because they’re people. Our society teaches us to consider folks like Dyjuan Tatro and Giovannie Hernandez, two of the film’s subjects, to be numbers or vermin or somehow less than us when they’re locked up, and they are considered to be little more than the property of a state or federal prison. But we...

Documentary fans, you’re going to be one happy lot this month. You’ll be able to check out a two-part profile on a powerhouse country music star; enjoy a long, hard look at an icon of haute couture; get a peek at a peerless athlete; tour the educational system in American prisons; and watch folks pay tribute to a show business temple. Those looking to get lost outside of the real world have plenty of options too, courtesy of another black comedy from Team Fleabag, a new live-musical adaptation...

The documentary lineup at the New York Film Festival showcases largely hidden worlds of the city and nearby environs.

When Tania Cypriano began filming Dr. Jess Ting at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital in 2017, he was one of only 40 surgeons in the United States who performed gender-confirming surgery.

“A lot of films about the trans experience have been made, but I wanted to make something new, that would speak to a larger audience,” says Cypriano, whose documentary is entitled “Born to Be.” “Learning what it is to be transgender, what is at stake and what the future of [these surgeries] looks like through Dr. Ting’s eyes was key.”

Ting and a handful of his patients allowed the director to film their surgeries. “We pitched the president of Mount Sinai, David Reich,” Cypriano says. “He looked at the documentary as an opportunity to show the public what Dr. Ting and his team were doing.

Films on Merce Cunningham, Roy Cohn and Oliver Sacks are among the notable titles set for the Spotlight on Documentary lineup at the 57th New York Film Festival.

Alla Kovgan’s “Cunningham 3D” centers on dancer and choreographer Cunningham, who was at the forefront of American modern dance for half a century. The Cohn documentary “Bully. Coward. Victim” is directed by Ivy Meeropol, whose grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were prosecuted by Cohn. Ric Burns’s “Oliver Sacks: His Own Life,” examines the British neurologist and author.

The Spotlight on Documentary also include Michael Apted’s “63 Up,” the ninth iteration of his “Up” series that followed the lives of 14 British children since 1964; Nick Broomfield’s “My Father and Me,” a portrait of his relationship with his father Maurice Broomfield; and Nicholas Ma’s short documentary “Suite No. 1, Prelude,” which captures the perfectionist tendencies of his father Yo-Yo Ma.

Two...

Section will include films from Nick Broomfield, Nanni Moretti and Michael Apted.

The New York Film Festival has unveiled a Spotlight on Documentary section that includes North American premieres for Nick Broomfield’s My Father and Me and Nanni Moretti’s Santiago, Italia and a Us premiere for Michael Apted’s 63 Up.

The festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center and running from September 27 to October 13, will also include world premieres for Lynn Novick’s College Behind Bars and Abbas Fahdel’s Bitter Bread.

The full Spotlight on Documentary line-up:

45 Seconds of Laughter

Tim Robbins, USA. Us premiere

A...

The New York Film Festival on Wednesday unveiled the lineup for its Spotlight on Documentary section, which include films from Nick Broomfield, Lynn Novick, Nicholas Ma, Nanni Moretti, Tim Robbins and Michael Apted and subjects ranging from dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham to Roy Cohn and Oliver Sacks.

Apted’s 63 Up, the ninth entry in his long-running film series, is making its U.S. debut at the fest, which runs September 27-October 13 and opens with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman.

The full lineup also features six world premieres and five U.S. premieres.

Here’s the full slate:

45 Seconds of Laughter

Dir. Tim Robbins, USA, 95m

U.S. Premiere

A selected group of inmates at the Calipatria State maximum-security facility have convened for a highly unlikely workshop. In prison they normally segregate themselves by gang or by race, but here they are all mixed together, sitting in a circle.

PBS boss Paula Kerger will stick around at the public broadcaster for a while. Kerger, who is president at CEO of PBS, revealed Monday at the TCA summer press tour that she has signed a five-year contract extension.

“It’s because I believe so strongly in the purpose and power of public television,” she said. “Public television isn’t just relevant for this modern age… I’m excited about what lies ahead.”

Kerger joined PBS in March 2006 and has been the longest-service president and CEO in PBS’ history. She has overseen series including Downton Abbey and Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War.

She also serves as president of the PBS Foundation, an independent organization that raises private sector funding, a significant source of revenue for new projects at PBS.

Prior to joining PBS, Kerger served for more than a decade at Educational Broadcasting Corporation, the parent company...

PBS CEO Paula Kerger has re-upped her contract for another five years, the executive announced on stage at the Television Critics Association press tour on Monday.

“I believe so strongly in the purpose and power of public television,” Kerger said. “The content that makes a difference in people’s lives, the conversations that bring people together, the programs and resources that prepare our youngest learners for success. Public television isn’t just relevant for this modern age, I believe that our work has never been more important, and I’m excited about what lies ahead.”

Kerger has held the position since 2006, and the new deal extends her run as the longest-serving president and CEO in PBS history.

Also Read: PBS Signs Carriage Deal With YouTube TV

“I always wanted to be sure that I’m adding value to the organization,” Kerger said, recalling the thought process behind deciding to commit...

Long-serving PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger is headed to the Banff World Media Festival to give a keynote address on the role of a modern pubcaster.

The PBS chief will speak as part of Banff’s Summit Series of headliners at the fortieth edition of the festival. She joins the previously announced Jeffrey Katzenberg in taking a summer trip to the Rockies to give a keynote at Banff.

Kerger is in her fourteenth year at the helm of PBS, which is the largest non-commercial media organization in the U.S. The PBS Kids 24/7 channel and streaming service has launched on her watch, and PBS has moved from the fourteenth most-watched network to the sixth.

In programming terms, her tenure has seen the success of British drama series on Masterpiece, most notably period hit “Downton Abbey.” Factual content has included Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary “The Vietnam War,” and...

PBS has previewed some of its 2019 launches at the Television Critics Association Press Tour.

Here’s the rundown:

*** Ken Burns’s Country Music will premiere Sept. 15. The 16-Hour documentary chronicles the history of the genre, from the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills to Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Garth Brooks and more. The eight-part series is directed by Burns and is produced by Burns and long-time collaborators Dayton Duncan and Julie Dunfey. It runs Sunday, September 15 through Wednesday, September 18, and Sunday, September 22 through Wednesday, September 25 at 8:00-10:00 p.m. Et.

*** PBS and Ryman Auditorium present Country Music: Live at the Ryman, a concert celebrating the Burns series. The show is set for March 27. Burns will host the evening, which will feature performances by Dierks Bentley, Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Rhiannon Giddens, Vince Gill, Brenda Lee,...

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross will keynote Variety’s inaugural Music for Screens Summit, held at Neuehouse in Hollywood on Oct. 30.

The day-long event, with ambient music exclusively provided by iHeartMedia, will focus on the latest trends in composing for film and television, music supervision, commercial synchs in the digital age, legacy act management, soundtracks’ enduring popularity, and more.

Interviewed by Kcrw’s Elvis Mitchell, Reznor and Ross will discuss their work together as composers, producers and songwriters. The two collaborated on the score for David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” and have since worked on composing for such projects as “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Gone Girl,” and “Patriot’s Day.” The duo entered the documentary realm in 2016, working alongside Gustavo Santaolalla and Mogwai on the score for the environmental advocacy film “Before the Flood” and collaborating with acclaimed filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on 2017’s “The Vietnam War.