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Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, the wife-and-husband producers who have 13 Oscar nominations and an Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award between them, will be honored at the Oscar Wilde Awards next month.

The 19th annual event is scheduled for Feb. 27, three days before the Academy Awards, at the historic Ebell theater in Los Angeles. Actors John C. Reilly and Éanna Hardwicke will be saluted as well.

Also new to the lineup is Will Ferrell, who will introduce Reilly and hand him his trophy. The pair, of course, have co-starred in such films as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006), Step Brothers (2008) and Holmes & Watson (2018).

Created by the US-Ireland Alliance, the Oscar Wilde Awards celebrate the work of those from Ireland — and some who are not — who contribute to film, television and music. (Kennedy, with eight Oscar noms, and Marshall, with five, are Californians born in Berkeley and Glendale, respectively.

Longtime broadcast journalist and author Jane Pauley and documentarian/director Alex Gibney have been tapped to receive lifetime achievement awards at the 45th annual News & Documentary Emmys. The honors were revealed Wednesday by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Pauley, currently the host of “CBS News Sunday Morning,” will receive her award during the news ceremony portion of the awards on Wed., September 25, while Gibney will be honored during the Documentary ceremony on Thursday, Sept. 26. Both ceremonies will take place at New York’s Palladium Times Square, and be streamed on NATAS’ viewing app.

Adam Sharp, President and CEO of NATAS, said: “We are honored to pay tribute to these two revered icons of our industry. Jane Pauley and Alex Gibney continue to reach viewers while at the same time opening doors for those coming behind them,” said NATAS president/CEO Adam Sharp in a statement. “This honor...

Alex Gibney has Frank Sinatra to thank for his most recent documentary – the two-part Emmy-contending film In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.

Simon, one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters, saw Gibney’s 2015 documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, and liked it so much he approached the Oscar-winning filmmaker about doing a potential film about his music career. Then, Simon sweetened the deal by inviting Gibney to his home in Texas to see him work on a new album, Seven Psalms.

Gibney joins Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to discuss what he learned about Simon’s songwriting process and how the artist, now 82, dealt with the loss of hearing in one ear that occurred as Simon was making Seven Psalms.

“It was destabilizing, I think, at first for him,” Gibney observes. The director also shares how a rerecording of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” in the...

The first thing to say about Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” is that it’s three-and-a-half hours long. Normally I wouldn’t lead with that daunting fact, especially since the film is mostly marvelous: a documentary that every Paul Simon fan on earth should want to see and experience. But will they?

I raise the issue only because “In Restless Dreams” has come into the Toronto Film Festival without a distributor, and let’s just be honest: The 209-minute running time, when you hear about it, doesn’t exactly sound…user-friendly. Gibney, of course, is one of the renaissance masters of contemporary documentary, a filmmaker of staggering skill and eclecticism. On occasion, he sprinkles in a music doc, which is clearly a labor of love for him. If you’ve never seen “Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown,” it’s sensational. And Gibney...

Paul Simon wanted a documentary. He was a fan of Alex Gibney’s 2015 “Sinatra: All or Nothing at All” and asked the Oscar-winner (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) to consider devoting a documentary to him on the occasion of recording his 15th album, “Seven Psalms”.

The result is “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” which had its world premiere as an all-rights sales title at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has a running time of three and a half hours. However, the capacity audience at the Princess of Wales theater didn’t fidget and gave Simon a rousing standing ovation. On stage, he admitted that he didn’t have the courage to watch the film in the theater, and asked if he got a standing ovation. The crowd jumped up for a second time. “And it’s my birthday,” he joked. (It’s actually October 13.)

Going in,...

At first, the title of Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” seems as if it could be a warning about the director’s approach in this supersized documentary. The film, its title seems to be saying, is about the music of Simon, not the life or the loves or the times of Simon. But it turns out that the music is a gateway to all those other things in this three-and-a-half hour film that covers most of what you’d want to know about the seminal singer-songwriter.

Partly, that’s because Gibney’s jumping off point is Simon’s new album, “Seven Psalms,” an uncommonly personal and soul-searching work for the man who’s been writing songs for seven decades. A half-hour meditation on faith and mortality that came to Simon in a dream and was written during a time when he’d begun to...

If you’ve noticed a lot of music documentaries hitting your favorite platforms, that groundswell is driven by record companies like Universal Music Group looking for ways to invigorate their catalogues. So it makes perfect sense that a musician’s son like Hollywood super-producer Frank Marshall — who has long been Hollywood’s fave party DJ, worked on Martin Scorsese’s The Band documentary “The Last Waltz,” and plays a mean guitar — would move into the space.

Marshall has directed a few features over the years and started producing non-fiction series and features before moving into directing with “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” and “Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name.”

There’s no question Marshall can afford to do whatever he wants with his time. He still devotes his day job to shepherding the latest “Jurassic World” and “Indiana Jones” sequels, and feeds...

Sam Pollard, the Peabody winning director of “Mr. Soul!” and “Sammy Davis, Jr.: I Gotta Be Me,” has set another documentary feature called “The Sound of Philadelphia” about music icons Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell and the musical genre they helped proliferate, Philly Soul.

“The Sound of Philadelphia” is a documentary produced by Warner Music Entertainment, Warner Chappell Music and Imagine Documentaries in partnership with Jigsaw Productions. Alex Gibney is executive producing the film.

The film will explore how Gamble, Huff and Bell — together known as “The Mighty Three” — founded the record label Philadelphia International Records and helped craft a signature sound heard in a catalog of over 3,500 songs. It includes tracks like “Love Train” by The O’Jays, “If You Don’t Know Me Now” by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul, “Rubberband Man” by the Spinners, “You Are Everything” by The Stylistics,...

“The Sound of Philadelphia,” a documentary on the 1970s “Philly Soul” sound and its masterminds Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell, is coming from Warner Music Entertainment, Warner Chappell Music, and Imagine Documentaries, in partnership with Jigsaw Productions, the companies announced on Wednesday. The lushly orchestrated but soulful sound — exemplified by songs like “Love Train” by the O’Jays, “If You Don’t Know Me Now” by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul, and “Tsop” by Mfsb and the Three Degrees – famously known for its use as the Soul Train theme song.dominated U.S. radio in the mid-1970s and influenced all of the R&b that has followed, perhaps most immediately with David Bowie’s “Young Americans” album, and most recently with Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s Soul Sonic.

The Oscar and Emmy award-winning executive producer Alex Gibney has signed on to the project,...

The story of Philly Soul as told by its three greatest hitmakers will be the focus of an upcoming documentary produced by Alex Gibney.

The Sound of Philadelphia will feature never-before-seen footage and exclusive interviews with Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, a.k.a. “the Mighty Three” who founded Philadelphia International Records and served as songwriters and producers for artists like the O’Jays, the Spinners, the Jacksons, and many more.

Gamble, Huff, and Bell said in a statement, “After six decades, we are incredibly proud to finally...

Exclusive: The story of Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, who created the sound of Philly Soul, is to be chronicled in a new feature documentary.

Sam Pollard, director of Mr. Soul!, MLK/FBI and Citizen Ashe, will direct The Sound of Philadelphia with Alex Gibney, director of docs including Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, set as exec producer.

The doc, which will tell the story of the sound of late ’60s/early ’70s soul music, comes from Warner Music Entertainment, publishing company Warner Chappell Music and Imagine Documentaries in partnership with Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions.

The Sound of Philadelphia will include exclusive interviews and never-before-seen footage featuring the songwriters and producers Gamble, Huff, and Bell – known as The Mighty Three. It will explore how the founders of the legendary record label Philadelphia International Records, crafted their sound and navigated the music business.

The trio wrote...

Marcus Lemonis and Nancy Glass have made a deal with “Let’s Make a Deal.” Lemonis and Glass have purchased the intellectual property behind the famed game show franchise from the founding families behind the show, which was created in 1963 by Stefan Hatos and Monty Hall.

Under the new ownership, Lemonis and Glass will now own all of the assets to “Let’s Make a Deal,” including the show’s trademark and legacy episodes. Fremantle will continue to license the format and trademark to produce the “Let’s Make a Deal” revival, hosted by Wayne Brady, that has aired on CBS since 2009. Fremantle did not have a comment at press time.

Lemonis and Glass’ Glass Entertainment Group are already in business on the podcast “One Hundred Percent with Marcus Lemonis,” which features Lemonis chatting with stars such as Charles Barkley and Gayle King about life advice.

Lemonis, the CEO of Camping World and other enterprises,...

“Roadrunner,” the Anthony Bourdain documentary from “20 Feet from Stardom” Oscar winner Morgan Neville, takes a page from documentaries like Alex Gibney’s “Sinatra: All or Nothing at All” in allowing the late chef and television personality to narrate his own story through the use of archival audio. Neville and his team culled through over a dozen hours of audio from Bourdain’s film, TV, audiobook, radio, and podcast appearances. But there are three instances in “Roadrunner” where Neville needed Bourdain narration that did not exist, so he turned to an artificial intelligence system that could recreate Bourdain’s voice.

As reported by The New Yorker in a recent interview with Neville: “There is a moment at the end of the film’s second act when the artist David Choe, a friend of Bourdain’s, is reading aloud an e-mail Bourdain had sent him: ‘Dude, this is a crazy thing to ask,...

Exclusive: Sony Pictures Television has put in development Mother Daughter Widow Wife, a limited series based on bestselling author Robin Wasserman’s novel, with Wasserman attached to pen the adaptation. Sharon Hall and her Mom de Guerre productions will executive produce. Sony Pictures TV is the studio.

Mother Daughter Widow Wife revolves around the question: Who is Wendy Doe? A woman found on a bus with no ID or memory of who she is becomes the obsession of a world-renowned psychiatrist, his lover and ambitious student and the daughter she left behind. The detangling of the mystery of Wendy’s identity leads these characters on a jaw dropping journey of discovery, reckoning and reclamation.

Wasserman’s Mother Daughter Widow Wife was released by Scribner this past summer to critical praise. Her previous fiction novel, Girls on Fire, was published by HarperCollins in 2016 and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR.

Last year, Rolling Stone joined forces with IndieWire, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and online-education platform Yellowbrick to launch “Film and TV Industry Essentials,” an online certificate program that will cover multiple, interlacing careers in the film and television industry. Contributors include filmmakers such as Judd Apatow and Ang Lee as well as a range of craftspeople and executives from across the industry.

Now module 3, which focuses on the production process, is now available. Watch the trailer to survey course offerings below.

The completely online program,...

Exclusive: The Kennedy/Marshall Company has named long-time employee Ashley Jay Sandberg as their new Head of Production Development. In her new role, Sandberg will oversee all Kennedy/Marshall scripted content at all stages.

Sandberg joined Kennedy/Marshall in 2011 and rose in the ranks after starting in the television department before moving into overseeing feature development alongside principal, Frank Marshall. As a Latina woman, Sandberg is set to champion underrepresented talent and stories across film and television.

“Ashley’s promotion reflects her many talents and invaluable contribution over many years at Kennedy/Marshall. We are excited for her to bring her creative instincts, natural leadership abilities, and passion for impactful storytelling to her new role,” said Marshall.

Sandberg has been based in London since January for the production of Jurassic World: Dominion. The forthcoming installment of the Jurassic Park franchise is one of the first films to return to production amidst the pandemic.

IndieWire is joining forces with Rolling Stone, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and online education platform Yellowbrick to launch “Film and TV Industry Essentials,” an online certificate program that will cover multiple, interlacing careers in the film and TV industry. Contributors include filmmakers such as Judd Apatow and Ang Lee as well as a range of craftspeople and executives from across the industry.

To sign up for email updates on the program, go here.

The completely online program, which will admit its first students in September, is comprised of modules covering the creative process, mechanics of crafts, business concepts, and criticism. The curriculum has been designed to help aspiring directors, producers, writers, and executives better understand their own inclinations and career paths. The organizers hope that Yellowbrick’s track record of attracting learners from diverse backgrounds will help draw talent that may not have otherwise found routes into the industry.

Former Sony Pictures Television head of drama Sharon Hall is returning to the studio as a producer. Hall has signed a multi-year first-look deal with Spt to develop scripted series for broadcast, cable, and streaming services, as well as international co-productions, through her Mom De Guerre Productions.

“We are so happy to have our great friend Sharon Hall back on the Sony lot,” said Jeff Frost, Chris Parnell, and Jason Clodfelter, Sony Pictures Television. “Her exquisite taste in material, eye for talent, and drive for quality is first-rate. Welcome home, Sharon!”

Hall recently served as President of Endemol Shine Studios, the scripted division of Endemol Shine North America which is behind Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here, before stepping down to transition to a producing role at the studio last year. At Endemol Shine, she shepherded development of Utopia, Gillian Flynn’s reimagining of the original UK series, which...

Cyber warfare, a topic that is at once oddly interesting and deeply unsettling, underpins Alex Gibney’s latest button-pressing documentary, Zero Days.

Peering into a world that is often masked by ones and zeroes, the feature is garnering a palpable buzz ahead of its festival circuit, and The Hollywood Reporter brings forth its chilling first trailer – one which showcases the devastating, morally-questionable effects of the Stuxnet computer worm.

Berlin International Film Festival is currently playing host to the film’s premiere, though before Gibney’s tech-savvy documentary made a beeline to Europe, Magnolia and Showtime had already snapped up distribution rights for the Us, which really ought to give you an idea of the pedigree behind the lens.

THR pitches Gibney’s new work as so:

“Members of the U.S. and international secret services outline the dangers of cyber war as illustrated by Stuxnet, the computer worm, apparently developed...

Above: Italian 4-foglio for The Joker is Wild (Charles Vidor, USA, 1957). Art by Enzo Nistri.Frank Sinatra, arguably the most important entertainer of the 20th century, was born 100 years ago today. I’ve become a little obsessed with him over the past week after watching Alex Gibney’s terrific 2-part, 4-hour HBO portrait Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. This of course got me thinking about Frank in movie posters, and I realized that I could barely come up with images of Sinatra posters in my head. While his best album covers are indelible and iconic, his movie posters tend to be less so. Scrolling through his filmography I realized that part of the problem is that his greatest films—On the Town, From Here to Eternity, Guys and Dolls, Some Came Running, Ocean’s 11—were almost always ensemble films in which Sinatra was never the standalone star, and so...

Above: Italian 4-foglio for The Joker is Wild (Charles Vidor, USA, 1957). Art by Enzo Nistri.Frank Sinatra, arguably the most important entertainer of the 20th century, was born 100 years ago today. I’ve become a little obsessed with him over the past week after watching Alex Gibney’s terrific 2-part, 4-hour HBO portrait Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. This of course got me thinking about Frank in movie posters, and I realized that I could barely come up with images of Sinatra posters in my head. While his best album covers are indelible and iconic, his movie posters tend to be less so. Scrolling through his filmography I realized that part of the problem is that his greatest films—On the Town, From Here to Eternity, Guys and Dolls, Some Came Running, Ocean’s 11—were almost always ensemble films in which Sinatra was never the standalone star, and so...

By Patrick Shanley

Managing Editor

This year’s festival season has seen a major influx of documentaries focused on musical artists. This is hardly a surprise to those that have followed the Oscar winners for best doc in recent years as 20 Feet from Stardom, which followed the lives of background singers to famous acts, took home the award in 2013 and Searching for Sugar Man, chronicling the investigation into the death of American musician Sixto Rodriguez by two Cape Town fans, won the prize in 2012.

This season boasts a slew of new musical documentaries hoping to achieve the same Oscar success of those in previous years.

Here’s a rundown of this year’s sonic documentaries:

Amy: Director Asif Kapadia presents the story of superstar British songbird Amy Winehouse, who passed away at the age of 27 in 2011 from alcohol poisoning, told in the singer’s own words in archival footage and never-before released tracks.

The Creative Arts Emmy Awards were handed out in Los Angeles last night (September 12), just a week ahead of the Andy Samberg-hosted Primetime Emmy Awards event.

HBO scooped the highest number of awards, with Game of Thrones and Queen Latifah's Bessie among the major winners.

Digital Spy presents a full list of all the winners and nominees below:

Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series

American Masters

Cancer: The Emperor Of All Maladies

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst - Winner

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

The Sixties

Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special

The Case Against 8

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief - Winner

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

Sinatra: All or Nothing At All

Virunga

Outstanding Variety Special

Bill Maher: Live From D.C.

The Kennedy Centre Honors

Mel Brooks Live At The Geffen

The Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special...

UKTV ratings roundup - data supplied by Barb

Ripper Street secures a ratings victory for the second successive week on BBC One.

The Victorian crime thriller was seen by an average audience of 3.38 million (18.3%) from 9pm.

BBC One's evening began with 2.29 million (13.5%) for Animal Super Parents at 7pm, and continued with 2.8 million (14.3%) for Would I Lie to You at 8.30pm.

The night ended with 2.06 million (17.2%) for Room 101 at 10.45pm.

Over on ITV, BBQ Champ continued with slightly lower figures of 1.76 million (9.5%).

Gino's Italian Escape: A Taste of the Sun was ITV's highest rated show outside of soaps, attracting 2.27 million (12.4%) at 8pm.

Back on the Beeb, The Hairy Bikers' Asian Adventure was seen by 760k (4.6%) at 7pm on BBC Two, while Great British Menu entertained 1.2 million (6.8%).

Mastermind returned with 1.7 million (9.3%) at 8pm, followed by Gardeners' World with 1.91 million (9.8%) and The Great British Bake Off: Extra Slice with...

HBO’s latest Alex Gibney documentary, Sinatra: All Or Nothing At All, premiered Sunday and out-delivered the network’s year-to-date time-slot average by 73% in total viewers – 963,000 vs 556,000. This improvement, not surprising given the subject matter, was driven by adults ages 50 and older, while younger adult demos all were down, though not always drastically. For instance, Sinatra clocked 103,000 in the 18-34 demo where the year-to-date time slot average was 133,000 &ndash…...