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How does a cult become a cult? How does a group of people that are often just trying to do something different, and sometimes even good, with their lives devolve into cult-ish behavior? Basically, since the advent of streaming, numerous docuseries have tried their hand at investigating this bizarre pipeline, from Wild Wild Country to Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults to The Vow. Now, Max is back at the game with The Synanon Fix: Did the Cure Become a Cult?, a four-episode-long Rory Kennedy miniseries about how a facility aimed at helping people with drug addictions eventually became one of the biggest cults in the United States. With its first two episodes already available on the platform and two more to drop on April 15 and April 22, the show aims to tell the whole story of this institution, from the moment it opened its door to addicts in the 50s...

Andy did you hear about this one?

Ross Dinerstein’s Campfire Studios has teamed with Dwayne Johnson and Dany Garcia’s Seven Bucks Productions, David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants Incorporated and Fifth Season for the first authorized feature documentary on comedy pioneer Andy Kaufman.

The documentary will be fully financed by Fifth Season is directing.

The project marks the second feature doc on Kaufman in development. Morgan Neville and Josh and Benny Safdie set up a film to be directed by Alex Braverman in April 2022.

Also Read:

Andy Kaufman Documentary in the Works From Producers Morgan Neville and Safdie Brothers

An official synopsis describes the latest documentary as featuring “unprecedented and exclusive access to Andy’s family, as well as personal and never-before-seen archives and private recordings – provided by the Kaufman Estate – and all Kaufman-related archival material from the estate of his longtime manager George Shapiro,” and promises that “the...

With HBO Max turning into Max, Warner Bros. Discovery is introducing a higher-priced plan — $19.99 per month — with an expanded bouquet of 4K Ultra HD content aimed at pushing customers to the pricier package.

On Monday, the company announced that the 4K tier will feature more than 1,000 films and episodes in 4K Uhd, an increase of nearly eightfold over what has been available in HBO Max.

The 4K Uhd content on Max will include “Game of Thrones,” “The House of the Dragon,” “The Last of Us,” the Harry Potter films, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Dark Knight trilogy, the Matrix films and more. Additionally, all Warner Bros. movies released this year and going forward will be available in 4K Uhd when they arrive on Max following their theatrical windows.

Max’s new Ultimate Ad-Free tier also will offer four concurrent streams, up to 100 offline downloads and Dolby Atmos and...

What’s one way to drum up anticipation for a streaming service merger? Keep the new name secret.

As Warner Bros. Discovery prepares to unveil its refreshed streaming service on April 12, outside partners are still awaiting official word on what exactly the merged HBO Max–Discovery streamer will be named as executives continue to refer to the service by its code name, “Beam,” according to people familiar with the matter. (That code name has been referenced for several months, although it’s unclear if there are several shorthand references to the services, either for in-house notes or with outside partners.)

The event, taking place at 10 am Pst on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank and streaming online, is set to showcase what the merged company’s marquee streaming service will look like as it loses the HBO Max name and gains programming from Discovery+.

Even as Beam is used internally,...

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UTA is lighting a fire for Ross Dinerstein and Campfire Studios.

The producer and his production company have signed with the agency for worldwide representation in all areas and he comes to the agency after having amassed dozens of scripted and unscripted credits, ranging from feature films to TV/streaming projects.

Dinerstein and Campfire’s current and most recent projects include HBO Max’s The Way Down and Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults; Hulu’s WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a 47 Billion Unicorn; FX’s Hysterical and The Most Dangerous Animal of All; Magnolia Pictures’ A Glitch in the Matrix; CNN’s The Lost Sons; Netflix’s Voir, Neymar: The Perfect Chaos and John Grisham’s The Innocent Man, and Special.

Dinerstein has also produced eight Netflix Original features including Rattlesnake, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1922, The Package, Rebirth,...

Exclusive: 101 Studios (Yellowstone), Above the Line Productions (Official Secrets), Campfire Studios (WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn) and Pzaj (Camp Hideout) are teaming on a feature documentary about the corruption within global soccer organization FIFA.

The feature documentary will follow late journalist Andrew Jennings’ investigation into the misconduct and corruption of FIFA’s executive team and members. Jennings’ background in investigative journalism and knowledge of criminology led him to unravel the organization from within. When his research captured the attention of the FBI and U.S. attorney Loretta Lynch, they teamed to reveal further layers of crime which led to multiple arrests and ultimately, the resignation of FIFA president Sepp Blatter.

Co-directed by Clay Tweel and Maura Anderson, the film will tell the story through the eyes of the investigative reporter who went head-to-head with the world’s most powerful sports organization.

The project was...

The Hollywood Critics Association is out with the nominees for its inaugural Hca TV Awards. Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso scored a leading eight noms overall, followed by Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale with seven. NBC and HBO took network/platform bragging rights with 29 nominations, edging Netflix’s 28.

The trophies will be handed during a August 22 ceremony at the Avalon Hollywood. See the full list of nominations below.

The Hca TV Awards separate their noms by comedies and dramas and, notably, into separate categories for broadcast, cable and streaming shows.

Mckenna Grace and Brooklynn Prince announced the nominees during a livestream this morning on the organization’s official YouTube channel.

Here are the nominees for the first Hca TV Awards, followed by a list on noms by network/platform:

Best Animated Series or Animated Television Movie

Animaniacs (Hulu)

Big Mouth (Netflix)

Bob’s Burgers (Fox)

Harley Quinn (HBO Max)

Invincible (Amazon...

In the narrative world, sequels are all the rage for films and even “limited” series if the first installment is wildly successful, but seldom do you see follow-ups for documentaries. But all six filmmakers at Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: Documentary panel — Samantha Stark (“The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears”), J. Clay Tweel (“Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults”), Cecilia Peck and Inbal B. Lessner (“Seduced: Inside the Nxivm Cult”), Tom Beard (“The Year Earth Changed”) and Jeff Orlowski (“The Social Dilemma”) — are definitely not opposed to sequels to their films, some of which cover ongoing stories.

Click on each name above to watch that person’s individual panel interview. Watch our full panel above to hear everyone’s answers and more.

“With our film it feels like it just cracked us open,” Stark says of “Framing Britney Spears,” which spotlights the 13-year conservatorship the pop icon...

Like many people, J. Clay Tweel, director of “Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults,” first heard of Heaven’s Gate when the bodies of 39 members of the group were discovered in March 1997. “I was in high school at the time in 1997. I grew up in a household that watched a lot of news, so I was inundated with it for about a two-, three-week basis. It just sort of took over the whole 24-hour news cycle back then,” Tweel recalls during Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: Documentary panel (watch above). “I think I saw it through the lens of a lot of Americans back then, which was it quickly became a joke, something to be exploited and laughed at. I watched all the nightly news clips about it, the monologues for all the late-night shows.”

Tweel didn’t really think about Heaven’s Gate again until the opportunity came up...

Gold Derby’s group discussion with six outstanding directors of TV documentaries launched our popular “Meet the Experts” panel series featuring Emmy contenders. Our senior editor Joyce Eng moderated the chat that included Samantha Stark (“Framing Britney Spears”), J. Clay Tweel (“Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults”), Cecilia Peck, Inbal B. Lessner (“Seduced: Inside the Nxivm Cult”), Tom Beard (“The Year Earth Changed”), Jeff Orlowski (‘The Social Dilemma’).

Six top TV documentary directors will reveal details behind their projects when they join Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&a event with key 2021 guild and Emmy contenders this month. Each person will participate in two video discussions to premiere on Monday, May 10, at 5:00 p.m. Pt; 8:00 p.m. Et. We’ll have a one-on-one with our senior editor Joyce Eng and a group chat with Joyce and all of the group together.

RSVP today to this specific event by clicking here to book your reservation. Or click here to RSVP for our entire ongoing panel series. We’ll send you a reminder a few minutes before the start of the show.

This “Meet the Experts” panel welcomes the following 2021 guild and Emmy contenders:

“Framing Britney Spears”: Samantha Stark

Stark was a News Emmy nominee for “Coming Out.” Other projects have included “They Get Brave,...

Exclusive: HBO and HBO Max are eyeing more stories of larger-than-life rock stars and social issues with a first-look deal with Gunpowder & Sky.

The two-year agreement will see the WarnerMedia cable network and streamer have first look at Gunpowder & Sky’s library of documentaries and docuseries.

The studio is behind projects such as music docs 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez, which told the story of controversial rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, and Everybody’s Everything, a film about the life of Soundcloud rapper Lil Peep, otherwise known as Gustav Elijah Åhr.

It is also the company responsible for Werner Herzog’s Last Exit: Space, political doc Kid Candidate, Bill Ackman’s crusade to expose global nutritional giant Herbalife as the largest pyramid scheme in history in Betting on Zero and Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop.

It was founded by former MTV chief Van Toffler, together with Floris Bauer...

The popular social media app TikTok will be the focus of a new feature documentary from “Coded Bias” director Shalini Kantayya.

The film is the latest offering from the team behind Hulu’s upcoming “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn,” which is set to premiere at this year’s SXSW. It’s being produced by Campfire, Forbes Entertainment and Olive Hill Media and will be based on Forbes’ reporting. The filmmakers say they will examine how a “nascent social media app, best known for viral dances, has served as the catalyst for heated controversy and endless conspiracy theorizing involving the U.S., China and a new tech-rooted Cold War that will shape the future of a global shared internet.”

Olive Hill Media will fully finance the picture.

“TikTok’s story is about the future of social media itself, and the increasing tension between democratic youth culture and authoritarian data surveillance,...

The filmmakers behind “Tiger” and “Fed Up” are teaming with the producer of “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” on a new investigative documentary into food safety.

Entitled “Poisoned,” the film will be directed by Stephanie Soechtig and executive produced by Jeff Benedict and produced by Ross Dinerstein’s Campfire. It will be based on Benedict’s book, “Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat.”

“‘Poisoned’ began with my interest in writing about the Jack in the Box E. coli infections in 1993 that sickened over 750 children, four of whom died,” said Benedict in a statement. “But once I entered that world, it became clear the story was much bigger than one outbreak. It’s the same broken system behind each of these horrific events, and while we’ve become more vigilant about what we eat, the issues plaguing the industry rage on.”

Soechtig...

Presented by:

The end of 2020 marked the English-language release of Digimon Card Game, the new trading card game based on the eponymous digital monsters. Like the previous iterations, and the anime they all draw from, Digimon Card Game is about digivolving your favorite creatures in order to eventually overwhelm your opponent. Whether it’s summoning from your hand, or growing them from digi-eggs as hatchlings, Digimon involves always being on the offensive to achieve victory.

A standard game plays out between two players, each having five life points, represented by “security cards,” and the winner is the player who removes the other’s life and deals a killing blow. Moves are determined by a ten point gauge—at the beginning of each round, you have ten points you can spend on any of your possible moves. However, this meter is shared on the field between both players, and if anything...

If you own or are about to own a PS5, it's time to love your new console even more. Starting today, HBO Max is now available on PlayStation 5, the latest videogame console from Sony Interactive Entertainment. PlayStationۑ users in the U.S. can download the HBO Max app, sign in, and start streaming the platform's full array of premium programming. The HBO Max app is also available on PlayStation 4.

HBO Max is WarnerMedia's direct-to-consumer streaming offering, with over 10,000 hours of curated premium content. The platform is home to best-in-class quality entertainment, featuring the greatest array of storytelling for all audiences with the iconic brands of HBO, Warner Bros., DC, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Turner Classic Movies and much more.

This month, the highly anticipated feature film Wonder Woman 1984 starring Gal Gadot flies onto HBO Max on Christmas Day - the same day it hits theaters across the country.

Additionally,...

Roku and WarnerMedia reached an agreement for the distribution of the HBO Max on the Roku platform — nearly seven months after the streaming service launched.

HBO Max will be live on Roku effective tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 17, the companies announced. The deal gives the streaming service coverage on all major over-the-top platforms. Its absence on Roku was a big hole: Roku counted 46 million active user accounts as of the end of September.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but both sides claimed they were pleased with finally resolving their differences.

WarnerMedia was looking to nail down an HBO Max pact with Roku as the service’s last major distribution partner ahead of the Dec. 25 day-and-date premiere of “Wonder Woman 1984” starring Gal Gadot on both HBO Max and in theaters. Meanwhile, as previously announced, all films in Warner Bros.’s 2021 slate will debut on HBO Max in the U.S.

Comcast customers with Xfinity X1 or Flex service can now watch HBO Max right from their cable boxes.

While the cable giant was one of WarnerMedia’s launch partners for HBO Max (inking a deal at the 11th hour), Comcast subscribers previously have had to use other platforms like iOS, Android, Apple TV or PlayStation console to stream HBO Max.

Notably, still missing from HBO Max’s device matrix is Roku, as the device maker and WarnerMedia have yet to reach terms on distribution pact. Amazon announced a deal in November to carry HBO Max on Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices, after it also held out for several months.

WarnerMedia and Comcast on Tuesday announced the rollout of the HBO Max app on Xfinity X1 and Xfinity Flex. That comes less than two weeks ahead of the premiere of “Wonder Woman 1984″ starring Gal Gadot on HBO Max on Christmas...

(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 Series: Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults Where You Can Stream It: HBO Max The Pitch: A docuseries that examines Heaven’s Gate, a UFO cult with 39 members who died by mass suicide in 1997. […]

The post The Quarantine Stream: ‘Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults’ Tries to Explain How People Succumb to Cognitive Dissonance appeared first on /Film.

With early rollouts of vaccines offering a sliver of silver lining to this most tumultuous of years, film festivals around the world already begin anticipating some return to normalcy in 2021. Falling annually around the middle of August, just before the leaves of the gorgeous Ticino valley begin losing their chlorophyll, the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland will be feeling more hopeful than many.

The 2021 festival will also be the first under the stewardship of new creative director Giona A. Nazzaro. A critic of 30 years, delegate of the Venice Critics’ Week, member of IFFR’s selection committee, and author of various tomes on action and Hong Kong cinema, Nazzaro recently took over the role from Lili Hinston—who helmed Locarno during the turbulent spell following Carlo Chatrain’s departure for the Berlin Film Festival in 2018 and online switch following the Covid-19 outbreak earlier this year. We caught up with Nazzaro earlier...

The number of podcasts being adapted for television is set to explode over the course of the next few years, with audio IP rivaling books as Hollywood’s go-to source for inspiration.

The podcasting business has been a growing source of intellectual property for the small screen for the last couple of years with the likes of Amazon’s Homecoming, USA Network’s Dirty John and ABC’s Alex, Inc. But Deadline understands that the number of podcasts in various stages of development to be adapted is now well into three figures. These includes the likes of Wondery’s crime drama Over My Dead Body and cult drama Guru: The Dark Side of Enlightenment, paranormal series Welcome to Night Vale, Neil Strauss’ investigative series To Live and Die In LA, basketball cheat scandal Whistleblower, Australian crime series The Teacher’s Pet, ESPN’s 30 for 30 on Clippers owner Donald Sterling The Sterling Affairs,...

From the 1975 disappearance of 20 people in small-town Oregon to the 1997 mass suicide of 39 people all wearing the same pair of Nike Decades in San Diego, “Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults” sketches the evolution of the UFO-worshipping cult that mystified Americans in the last quarter of the 20th century. Director Clay Tweel’s new four-episode HBO Max docuseries ambitiously works to humanize the otherwise dotty members of Heaven’s Gate, led by messiah-wannabe closet case Marshall Applewhite. While most viewers are likely to tune in for, and possibly even skip ahead to, the final episode that details “The Exit,” there’s plenty of fascinating material in the lead-up — even if it doesn’t exactly warrant four hourlong installments.

A half-baked, hokey blend of pseudo-Christianity, New Age mysticism, and “Star Trek” lore, Heaven’s Gate was built on the belief that humans were, in fact, extraterrestrials living in shells known among the sect’s members as “vehicles.

Frank Lyford left the Heaven’s Gate cult four years before 39 of his “classmates” committed mass-suicide in 1997. Now, you can watch him tell his story in HBO Max’s “Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults” docuseries — including a mid-series explanation of why his voice sounds the way it does.

Heaven’s Gate was led by Marshall Applewhite, who went by the name “Do,” and Bonnie Nettles, who went by “Ti.” Nettles died of cancer in 1985, but Applewhite went on to lead the cult until ’97, at which point he and the remaining cult members ingested barbiturate-laced apple sauce followed by vodka and covered their heads in plastic bags, which killed them. The group believed that once they freed themselves from their earthly bodies, they would be able to board an alien spacecraft that they thought was trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

Lyford, who was part of the cult for 18 years, said that...

There’s a lot to be shocked by when it comes to the religious UFO cult Heaven’s Gate, but one of the oft-forgotten aspects was the mass-castration cult members willingly took part in.

In an exclusive clip from the upcoming HBO Max docuseries “Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults,” a former member explains why he wanted to be the first person to undergo the procedure despite the fact that it was to be performed by a former nurse in a non-medical facility. “It’s terribly human,” he says regarding his reasoning. Watch the clip above.

“As someone who was so deeply entrenched into the cult for so long, Sawyer’s insight into the group and pivotal moments such as this are key throughout the documentary,” Ross Dinerstein, executive producer on the series, said in a statement. “Not only was he present for these moments, he was typically at the center,...