Today In Entertainment

JANUARY 13, 2021

What's news: Why Hollywood should be concerned if Big Tech loses its liability shield, festivals and award shows scramble amid COVID surge, production in L.A. hits pandemic low, Biden inaugural committee taps Tom Hanks for cross-network TV special, Nic Pizzolatto negotiating exit from FX deal, Univision plots a Spanish-language streamer, Netflix releases its first inclusion report. Plus: Movement on the network pilot front, and The THR Director Roundtable. --Alex Weprin

 THR Director Roundtable

►On the cover: The THR Director Roundtable: Regina King, Spike Lee, George Clooney, Chloe Zhao, George C. Wolfe, Lee Isaac Chung and Paul Greengrass reflect on the state of the "cinematic experience" amid the pandemic, and discuss the joys of perfect casting, the most challenging scenes, and the Academy's diversity-and-inclusion efforts.

--On the Film Academy's Oscars inclusion requirements...

Regina King: "In theory, it sounds like a great idea to give opportunity to people who don't get the opportunity, who continuously get overlooked, but then there's also, how do you fulfill those requirements when you're shooting in Iceland? And there's a very specific relationship between white and Black people in America, just because of the history of Black people coming to America and how we got here, but when you talk about inclusivity, we're talking about more than just Black people, we're talking about women, we're talking about how you identify as a gender. So I don't know how all of that plays in the rules."

Spike Lee:  In my opinion, you rectify this by having those people in the room that I call the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are the ones that decide what film's getting made and what film doesn't get made, not the Academy. You have to go to that high, rarefied air of the people who have greenlight votes at studios and networks. They're the ones that have the power, and that's where I love my man Lin-Manuel [Miranda, creator of Hamilton, for which he wrote the song 'The Room Where It Happens']. You've got to be in the room. If we're not in the room, they're sh*t out of luck."

--Adapting to unexpected surprises...

George Clooney: "We're in Iceland on a glacier and I got a call from Felicity [Jones] and she says, 'Well, I'm pregnant.' I knew how to answer that, which is, 'Congratulations.' But if you saw my face, I'm like, 'Holy sh*t.' We started to try to shoot around it, which is always a mistake, because you can't shoot around it. People know when you're hiding things. So we just looked at it and said, 'Look, they've been in space for two years, people have sex. It's like going on location.' I just thought, like Fran [McDormand] in Fargo, women every single day are pregnant, going to work and doing their job, and why not in space and why not just deal with it?"

On directing Chadwick Boseman's final performance...

George C. Wolfe: "I knew absolutely nothing. I had no sense of it. He would do take after take of these deep, raw emotional moments. There's a moment in the film where he breaks through this door, and he kicked so violently that the door shattered and we had to figure out how to put it together. Every single thing that he was doing had this incredibly intense level of commitment to it. He was thinner, but I thought he was fasting or something like that, there was no indication emotionally or physically that anything else was going on. … I found out when the world found out, and it was just devastating and shocking, because I sensed nothing else was going on, other than an actor giving every single ounce of what he had to make the character in the film and the moments come alive." The full THR Director Roundtable.

 Hollywood's Section 230 Concern

►If Big Tech loses its legal shield, Hollywood should worry. A growing chorus of politicians is looking to rein in Twitter and Facebook over misinformation or censorship claims — but regulation has the potential to impact traditional media, too, Eriq Gardner writes.

--"While fooling around with user-generated content impacts the entertainment industry on the margins — think talent scouting on YouTube or Facebook- and Twitter-based marketing campaigns — nothing would be as game-changing as the notion that the government gets to lay down broader rules about what speech is disseminated. 'If politicians can tell platforms you have to carry President Trump’s speech, there’s a short distance in dictating what op-eds are to run on The New York Times or what perspectives are shown on television,' says Daphne Keller, the director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University." The story.

►"Everyone's in a horrible position": Festivals, award shows scramble amid COVID-19 surge. The Oscars’ April 25 date appears safe, but the Grammys are on the move and the SAG Awards may be next, while Sundance is slimming down and Cannes is drawing up COVID-19 contingency plans, Tatiana Siegel an Scott Roxborough report. The story.

►Production in Los Angeles hit new pandemic-era lows last month. FilmLA released its latest report examining filming in the greater Los Angeles area in the month of December, revealing that film permit requests dropped a steep 25 percent compared to the prior month. Filming activity had already dropped nearly 8 percent in November — but the organization says that permit requests declined from 813 that month to 613 in December. As another comparison, there were 965 permits in Dec. of last year. The story.

+Meanwhile up north: Ontario has decided to leave Hollywood film and TV shoots on local soundstages untouched as the province declares a state of emergency amid a resurgent coronavirus outbreak. More.

►Chinese blockbuster's similarity to Fox's Fault In Our Stars ignites debate over derivative work. Cancer drama A Little Red Flower has touched the hearts of local filmgoers and earned $167 million, but an official paper trail in Beijing appears to show how the movie grew out of Fox's 2016 efforts to produce a licensed remake of its Shailene Woodley-starring hit. The story.

 Biden Plans Inauguration Primetime Special

►Biden inaugural to get cross-network TV special. President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris' Presidential Inaugural Committee on Wednesday announced a primetime special that will effectively serve as the conclusion to the day's events. The special, Celebrating America, will be hosted by Tom Hanks and will air from 8:30 p.m.-10 p.m. on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC, while also streaming on the PIC's YouTube and social media channels.  The special will feature performances by Jon Bon Jovi, Justin Timberlake, Demi Lovato, Ant Clemons, and other performers still to be announced. Biden and Harris will also make remarks. The story.

+The PIC is also turning to Hollywood to help raise funds for the event. The commitee will host a virtual fundraiser, "Conversations with Actors from The West Wing, Scandal, and Designated Survivor," will be moderated by Designated Survivor actor (and Obama administration alum) Kal Penn, with Scandal's Bellamy Young and The West Wing's Bradley Whitford, Richard Schiff, Dulé Hill and Janel Moloney confirmed to attend. More.

+Meanwhile: YouTube announced Tuesday evening it has temporarily prevented new content from being uploaded to President Donald Trump's account for one week, citing violation of the video-sharing platform's policies... The Motion Picture Association, The Walt Disney Company, Comcast, AT&T, Hallmark and Facebook are joining the list of companies that are rearranging their political contributions and business relationships to distance themselves from President Trump and the G.O.P. the week after supporters of the president rioted at the U.S. Capitol...

+Social media put us all in our own Truman Shows, threatening our democracy. Big Social's business is keeping people hooked on their platforms, and their algorithms feed us content that provokes fear and outrage, writes Netflix's Social Dilemma filmmaker Jeff Orlowski in a guest column.

--The experts and tech insiders we interviewed in the film warned us about the dire consequences of letting Big Social play God. When Facebook’s former director of monetization, Tim Kendall, was asked in our film what he was most worried about, he replied, “civil war.” At the time that seemed alarmist, but today it feels prescient. The guest column.

►The Nic Pizzolatto era at FX is coming to an early end. Multiple sources tell THR's Lesley Goldberg that FX and Fox 21/Touchstone Television are negotiating with the True Detective creator on an exit package that would end his first-look deal with the two Disney-owned brands. The decision, per sources, comes as Pizzolatto has two years remaining on the deal that he signed last year. The story.

In other TV news...

+NBC is moving forward with three of its front-runner pilots. On Tuesday, the network handed out series orders for comedies Grand Crew and American Auto as well as drama La Brea. All three series — which were developed and picked up to pilot this time a year ago — will air during the 2021-22 broadcast season. The story.

+ABC has given a formal pilot order to a drama project from Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail. Esmail will write and direct Acts of Crime, which is described as a unique spin on the crime procedural. The pilot order comes as no surprise, as it landed a production commitment when ABC put it into development in the fall. More.

+A true-crime podcast examining the life and times of Ghislaine Maxwell is being adapted for TV. The rights to Hunting Ghislaine, from Brit radio station LBC and radio and outdoor media giant Global, has been picked by Sony Pictures Television-backed Eleventh Hour Films, with plans to turn it into a limited scripted series. More.

+It's the end of an era at OWN. The cable network's first and longest-running scripted series, The Haves and the Have Nots, is set to end with its current eighth season. The show's midseason finale airs Tuesday night, with the final batch of episodes set for May. More.

+How broadcast TV's response to COVID-19 could give some comedies and dramas an awards boost. Typically the ugly stepsiblings during awards season, some broadcast series have earned new relevance by incorporating the recent events of the pandemic into their storylines, Michael O'Connell writes. The story.

+NFL ratings: The opening round of the NFL playoffs drew a significantly smaller audience than it did a year ago. CBS drew the biggest audience of the wild card weekend, with an assist from Nickelodeon. More.

►Here comes another network-backed streaming service. Univision, the Spanish-language TV giant on Tuesday announced it's preparing to launch a free, ad-supported streaming platform called PrendeTV. Billed as the first such service built exclusively for Hispanic audiences in the United States, it's set to debut in the first quarter of the year. The service is hoping to take a bite out of the Spanish-language streaming business, which has been underserved in the U.S. The story.

+In other streaming news: Nielsen released a list of the most watched streaming titles of the past year in terms of total minutes viewed (led by The Office) in conjunction with its presentation at CES — where it also announced that it would begin measuring theatrical films released on VOD platforms. The numbers. Also, Pamela McClintock has more on Nielsen's plans to measure theatrical films on VOD. More.

►RIP, CNN Airport Network. In a memo to staff Tuesday, CNN president Jeff Zucker said that the CNN Airport Network, a staple at major airports around the world since 1992, will shut its doors at the end of March. "The steep decline of airport traffic because of COVID-19, coupled with all the new ways that people are consuming content on their personal devices, has lessened the need" for the airport-focused channel, Zucker wrote.

►TV review: Daniel Fienberg reviews Epix's Bridge and Tunnel, writing that the show "has some of the same backward-looking sentimentality and the kind of camera-friendly young cast that helped turn Netflix's Outer Banks into one of the surprise hits of last spring. Except that nothing happens." The review.

►Film review: David Rooney reviews The Mauritanian, writing that "this legal procedural remains strangely flat, despite its star power and a gripping central performance from Tahar Rahim as Slahi. An unimpeachably well-intentioned treatment of a dark chapter in American justice, it's methodical and serious-minded to a fault." The review.

Revolving door: UTA agent Jason Richman is getting a promotion. The rep will now co-lead the agency’s media rights group... Fox News Media has tapped Jason Klarman to be president of its Fox Nation streaming service... Satchel and Jackson Lee, the children of Spike Lee, will be this year's Golden Globes Ambassadors, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced on Tuesday... YA publishing industry veteran Christian Trimmer has been appointed to head the relaunch of MTV Books in partnership with Simon & Schuster...

Casting roundup: Joe Jonas, Daren Kagasoff and Spencer Neville have joined the high-flying cast of Devotion, a Korean War drama from Black Label Media... ABC is going to the dogs with Rebel Wilson. The Disney-backed broadcast network has tapped the former Pitch Perfect star to host a dog grooming competition series called Pooch Perfect...

In other news...

--Netflix has released its first-ever inclusion report. Accompanied by a nine-minute short film featuring a diverse cross-section of employees across Netflix, the report’s title — “Sowing the Seeds: Inclusion Takes Root at Netflix” — frames the past two years as a foundation-laying chapter in its ongoing work to cultivate a culture of inclusion at the company.

--Warner Bros.' Judas and the Black Messiah, where Daniel Kaluuya plays Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, and Egyptian director Ali El Arabi's documentary Captains of Zaatar have joined the Sundance Film Festival's 2021 lineup.

--NBCUniversal has identified 10 nonprofit organizations that are the latest beneficiaries of parent company Comcast’s multi-year, $100 million pledge to combat structural inequity and support education and training, particularly in the media industry, for the underserved.

--A group of film industry insiders connected to Bradley Beach, New Jersey— including the Emmy-nominated actor Patrick Wilson, a longtime local — have formed a venture called Cinema Lab, which intends to preside over the restoration and expansion of not only their local theater, but also others impacted by the pandemic.

--Meyer Sound is introducing Ultra Reflex, a patent-pending system for accurate reproduction of audio on large direct-view video displays, for uses including in home-cinema, postproduction studios and commercial theaters. At launch, it's paired with Sony’s Crystal LED displays, the latest of which are being featured this week as part of the virtual CES show.

--Blackstone Group has started the process of buying Lucasfilm's flagship building in Singapore for about $132 million (175 million Singaporean dollars).

What else we're reading...

--"Can conservative media still return to business as usual?" [NY Times]

--"Four years ago, I wondered if the media could handle Trump. Now we know." [Washington Post]

--"Not a drive-in: An L.A. theater gets city approval for an outdoor stage" [LA Times]

--"Dan Le Batard, John Skipper's progressive response to 'Outkick' [Front Office Sports]

Today's birthdays: Liam Hemsworth, 31, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, 60, Andrew Yang, 46, Patrick Dempsey, 55, Natalia Dyer, 26.

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JANUARY 13, 2021

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