News

Shawn Levy, executive producer of the mega-hit series Stranger Things, and singer/actor Nick Jonas have come aboard a new Ya series for Netflix based on the book series Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. They also wrote Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

Levy and Jonas are coming together to produce the holiday show that has the shortened title of Dash & Lily, which will have a first season made up of eight episodes, each thirty minutes long.

Austin Abrams and Midori Francis star as the title characters, and Variety provides the following description for the series:

In the show, a whirlwind holiday romance builds as cynical Dash and optimistic Lily trade dares, dreams, and desires in the notebook they pass back and forth at locations all across New York City, finding they have more in common with each other than they would have expected.

Filmmaker Matt Reeves has found his Catwoman. The War for the Planet of the Apes helmer is in the midst of prepping his new, rebooted take on DC Comics hero Batman in a film called The Batman, and Variety reports that actress Zoe Kravitz has landed the role of Catwoman, beating out finalists Zazie Beetz (Atlanta) and Eiza Gonzalez (Baby Driver). Sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe, Catwoman is one of the more iconic characters in the Batman comics, and she’s been seen many times before in live-action Batman films—Michelle Pfeiffer's turn in Batman Returns is …...

Long before Tyler Perry entered Hollywood, he built an audience through plays that he wrote, produced and often starred in. His strategy was spurred by his pursuit of ownership, and he says his prayers led him to create and showcase stories about religion, family and their triumphs over worldly evils.

Since then, he has built a production empire in Atlanta. As he prepares to open another studio, his 12 soundstages are home to shows including Nick Cannon’s “Wild ’N Out,” “Divorce Court” and Bet’s “Sunday Best,” along with his own original content such as “The Haves and the Have Nots” and “If Loving You Is Wrong” on Own.

His first mention in Variety was on Sept. 5, 2003, for the play “Madea’s Class Reunion.”

In 2003, Variety’s reviewer said, “Tyler Perry is a raw, major talent just beginning to hit his stride.” Do you feel like you’re still hitting that stride?...

How much direction did Robert Pattinson need to play the heir to the French throne in “The King”?

As it turns out, not much — just let him be.

“Pretty much in ways that I fully 100% endorse and love, that character is a Robert Pattinson creation,” the film’s director, David Michôd, said on this week’s episode of Variety and iHeart’s “The Big Ticket” podcast. “A lot it was kept under wraps.”

Michôd continued, “The great fear always is that you end up with ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ and ridiculous French accents. But at the same time, I kind of needed his character to be kind of absurd.”

In the film, based on several William Shakespeare plays, Pattinson portrays the son of the French king who instigates war with Henry V (Timothée Chalamet). The “Lighthouse” star appears with long, blonde hair and is adorned with jewelry. He provokes Henry V with insults,...

Sony recently hosted a SAG-AFTRA screening of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” the Marielle Heller-directed drama starring Matthew Rhys as a magazine writer who befriends Fred Rogers, played by Tom Hanks.

While the screening didn’t include a guild Q&a with cast or the film’s creative team, the audience was greeted with a video message from Mister Rogers’ widow, Joanne. “The film is a wonderful tribute to Fred’s life. But more than that it’s incredibly timely. With so much conflict going on in the world, I think people are hungry for kindness,” she said. “Fred’s legacy reminds us to be kind and to be neighborly, to try and forgive those who have hurt us and to see the innate goodness in all people.”

The theater, a full house of about 200 people, was immediately filled with “awws” and “aahs.”

“Fred used to say...

The 2019 Emmys, which air live nationwide on Sunday, September 22 beginning at 5:00 p.m. Pt/8:00 p.m. Et, will be available for cable TV subscribers to watch online at the Fox website. And in certain markets, you can watch the live stream if you subscribe to Directv Now, Hulu Live TV, Playstation Vue, and YouTube TV. All of these streaming services offer free trial periods.

The Emmy Awards red carpet show from outside the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles kicks off 30 minutes prior to the start of the ceremony. TV’s top honors are following the lead of this year’s Academy Awards and won’t have a host. That should speed up the proceedings, with a whopping 27 awards scheduled to be handed out. That is three more than either the Oscars or the Tonys.

We are predicting the winners of all these races at the 7ist Primetime Emmy Awards: “Game of Thrones,...

Julian Fellowes was all wrong for his time — at first. When he graduated from drama school in 1973, working-class dramas onstage were all the rage, and the aspiring actor struggled to get an agent. He eventually snagged a supporting role in “A Touch of Spring,” a West End comedy that required him to fall down a set of stairs nightly and brought him his first mention in Variety, a May 21, 1975, review that dubbed him “effective as a feckless young American diplomat.” Roles in film and TV shows followed, but Fellowes found his greatest success at a keyboard: In 2002, he won an Oscar for writing “Gosford Park” and gave up acting for good. He created TV series “Downton Abbey” in 2010, with the show racking up 15 Emmys, including a pair for Fellowes. Now he’s back with more adventures of the Crawley clan and its servants — this time on the big screen in a film opening Sept.

Jeff Daniels is coming to Showtime. The network just announced the Newsroom star has joined their new TV show, Rust, Variety reports.

Based on the novel by Philip Meyer, the drama series "is described as a family drama that will explore the tattered American dream through the eyes of complicated and compromised chief of police Del Harris (Daniels) in a Rust Belt town in southwest Pennsylvania."

Read More…...

In an article in Variety, Owen Gleiberman praises Quentin Tarantino’s 9th film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which hit theaters nationwide this weekend. The ending, however, was a missed opportunity: “Here’s my analysis of how Quentin Tarantino muffed the landing of what could have been a great movie,” he prefaces. Stephen King, however, does […] The post Stephen King Weighs In on Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’s Wild Ending appeared first on Dread Central.

Emma Watson has been tapped to join the A-list cast of Greta Gerwig’s cinematic adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

While her exact role remains unknown at present, EW confirms that it was the same character Emma Stone was previously rumored to play. According to a report in Variety, Stone was forced to bow out of the film because it conflicted with promotional obligations for her upcoming movie, The Favourite.

The former Harry Potter lead will star alongside Meryl Streep, Timothee Chalamet, Saoirse Ronan, and Laura Dern in the Sony Pictures production, which will be both written and directed by Gerwig.

Writers Guild of America East executive director Lowell Peterson is gearing up for a second round of lobbying in Albany for the passage of a diversity production tax credit in New York state.

The tax credit is at the top of a long to-do list for the guild that has seen double-digit growth in membership during the past five years, thanks to the Peak TV phenomenon and a string of successful organizing efforts at prominent digital media firms such as Vice, Gizmodo Media Group, and ThinkProgress.

Peterson discusses the guild’s efforts to guide writers through the maze of a fast-changing media business in the latest episode of “Strictly Business,” Variety‘s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of entertainment.

Listen to this week’s podcast for free below:

“In the long run the industry can’t prosper if it doesn’t resemble the society that it is making stories for,...

At last, an expressionist silent classic that takes full advantage of cinematic principles. The legendary E.A. Dupont goes in for subjective-emotional effects of which Hitchcock would approve, and cameraman Karl Freund and effects wizard Eugen Schüfftan pull off spectacular visuals and special effects. No wonder this was a huge hit in America, it’s way ahead of its time (and ours, in some ways).

Varieté

Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1925 / Color tinted / 1:33 Silent Ap / 95 min. / Street Date August 22, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Lya De Putti, Warwick Ward, Alice Hechy, Georg John, Kurt Gerron.

Cinematography: Karl Freund, Karl Hoffman

Art Director: Alfred Junge, Oscar Friedrich Werndorff

Visual Effects: Eugen Schüfftan

Original Music: Erno Rapee

From the book Der Eid des Stephan Huller by Felix Hollaender

Produced by Erich Pommer

Written and Directed by E. A. Dupont

We carefully studied this show in film school, in a mangled...

Three classics get digital restoration for Berlin festival.

The Berlinale has announced the first trio of titles to screen in its Berlinale Classics strand.

Varieté, the 1925 silent movie by director E. A Dupont, features Emil Jannings, the world’s first winner of an Oscar.

In Jahrgang 45, director Jürgen Böttcher takes a look at young people’s lives in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg in the 1960s.

Ula Stöckl’s 1968 debut fictional feature, 9 Leben hat die Katze (The Cat Has Nine Lives) revolves around five women and asks the extent to which the emancipation of women can succeed in a male dominated society.

Each film has benefitted from full digital restoration.

Berlinale Classics will also present a panel discussion titled Digitising Film Heritage in the Future.

The full Classics lineup will be announced in January.

E.A. Dupont had perhaps the most precipitous career trajectory of any German filmmaker of the silent years, plunging from the pinnacle of his native industry to the stinky depths of The Neanderthal Man (1953) in Hollywood. Supposedly the secret of his lack of success was an incident in 1939 when he was fired for slapping a bit player on the set of a Dead End Kids picture, and he spent a decade working as a talent agent (helped no doubt by his obvious sympathy for performers, ahem). It might be observed that if you're directing a Dead End Kids picture your career has already descended a few notches since your Ufa heyday.

Varieté (1925) was Dupont's breakthrough film, and today it's remembered more in film histories than it is actually seen: there's never been a DVD to my knowledge, and the copies drifting about in cyberspace are patchy and aged off-air recordings with...

Tab Hunter turns 80 today. In his honor, Turner Classic Movies is showing five of his films. The first of the batch, Phil Karlson's Western Gunman's Walk, is on right now. Hunter and The Time Tunnel's James Darren play rancher Van Heflin's sons. Next is Ride the Wild Surf, starring Hunter and teen idol Fabian as a couple of dudes riding waves in Hawaii. Featuring some cool surfing footage and tons of corny dialogue, Ride the Wild Surf is a guilty pleasure. In his highly readable autobiography, Tab Hunter: Confidential, Hunter says his brother Walt — a former surfer — was his inspiration for the role. (Not that Hunter actually had to do any surfing.) He adds that director Don Taylor (Elizabeth Taylor's husband-to-be in Father of the Bride) had to step away for a week due to a death in the family, so Phil Karlson was brought in as a temporary replacement.

The Oscar-winning team behind A Beautiful Mind is about to get even more cerebral, as Variety reports that director Ron Howard, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and producer Brian Grazer are reteaming for Sony's The DaVinci Code, based on Dan Brown's runaway bestseller. The suspense tale of a hunky academic and a sexy cryptographer who race against the clock to unravel a mystery hidden in the works of Leonardo DaVinci is expected to be Howard's next project after Cinderella Man. Goldsman will adapt the book, and Grazer will produce; no casting has yet been set. Author Brown recently sold the rights to The DaVinci Code and his other books to Sony for over $6 million.