ICM Partners have hired veteran music agent Simon Clarkson, who brings with him to the agency several clients including Skrillex (for Europe), Alison Wonderland (outside North and South America), Aluna George and San Holo. Clarkson, who will be based in Los Angeles, starts at the agency immediately and will head up its domestic Electronic Music
Month: August 2020
CuriosityStream, the nonfiction streaming company headed by Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks, is going public through a reverse merger with a firm set up to execute just such a roll-up deal. CuriosityStream is combining with Software Acquisition Group Inc., a special purpose acquisition company that raised about $150 million in November 2019. The merger is
Draya Michele, famous for her turn in reality TV show “Basketball Wives L.A.,” has inked a deal for a docu-series — all about her life — coming to subscription-streaming service Zeus this fall. The 10-part series, “Doses of Draya,” promises a behind-the-scenes look at the actor-model-entrepreneur-social media influencer’s life as she builds her businesses and
John Legend is a lover man, a family man, a soul man, an EGOT, a film and television producer, and — in a role that certainly has not escaped the attention of the president of the United States, or most anyone else — a political animal. That he does it all with conscience and consciousness
The 2021 NAMM Show, scheduled for the week of Jan. 18, 2021 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Southern California, has canceled its in-person event and will take place online due to the continued spread of coronavirus, the organization announced on Monday. In place of the annual in-person event, organized by the National Association of
The Venice Film Festival has completed the lineup of its 77th edition with the addition of “Fiori, Fiori, Fiori!,” a short film shot during the lockdown by Luca Guadagnino, the director of Oscar-nominated “Call Me By Your Name,” and U.S. film “Run Hide Fight,” about a high-school massacre. Both titles will play in the Out
UPDATED: It’s finally here. After months of feverish anticipation, U.K. cinema goers will be able to buy their tickets for the year’s most anticipated movie, “Tenet.” Tickets for the Christopher Nolan thriller, which will release in U.K. cinemas on Aug. 26, are set to go on sale on Wednesday morning at chains such as Showcase
The Zurich Film Festival has revealed more details of its first Zurich Market, an on-site event organized in collaboration with Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival that will see the Swiss event hosting screenings in local cinema theaters for about 20 new independent titles. Described by the festival in a press statement as “highly anticipated titles,”
As the mercury soared, collections plummeted as the heatwave across England took its toll on the U.K. and Ireland box office over the weekend. Russell Crowe’s “Unhinged,” released by Altitude Film Distribution, retained the box office crown with a weekend gross of £117,633 ($154,000), a decline of 34% from last week, despite increasing screen count
Zurich-Berlin based Tellfilm, producer of “Blue My Mind” from “Killing Eve” director Lisa Brühlmann, is set to go into production on Aug. 22 on its biggest movie yet, “Monte Verità,” a period drama about a woman’s across-the-board emancipation. Set to shoot in the Locarno region of Ticino, southern Switzerland, “Monte Verita” is lead produced by
Production on Argentine-born, Swiss-educated filmmaker Marí Alessandrini’s debut feature “Zahorí” ground to a halt in the middle of post-production. With the same amount of already limited budget and an estimated extra year before the film can premiere, she has been forced to finish editing on her own. With more than a decade of short filmmaking
Letterbox Filmproduktion, producer of ZDF-Arte hit “Bad Banks” – and part of the Studio Hamburg Production Group that backed Netflix’s “Unorthodox” – has boarded “Davos,” a high-end drama series from Zurich-based film producer Content Film, producer of “Wonderland.” “Davos,” a period espionage thriller, is being written by Germany’s Julia Penner, head writer on seasons 3,
UPDATED: Academy Award-nominated “Call Me By Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino’s new series “We Are Who We Are” is heading to youth-skewing channel BBC Three in the U.K. The HBO/Sky Italia co-production, which was acquired from distributor Fremantle, tells the story of two American kids who live on a U.S. military base in Italy. Jack
Following its acquisition of Endemol Shine Group, former ESG chief creative officer Peter Salmon will serve as executive chairman at Banijay U.K. with former territory COO Lucinda Hicks stepping in as CEO. The appointments are valid from September. Salmon will oversee the U.K. portfolio of 25 unscripted and scripted production labels, with a focus on
High-end drama series “Leonardo,” starring Aidan Turner (“Poldark”) as the Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci has wrapped its Italian shoot after becoming one of the first large-scale productions to resume production during the coronavirus crisis. The series is co-produced and distributed worldwide by Sony Pictures Television. Producers also include Lux Vide with RAI Fiction and
The Variety Steaming Room will present the 2020 Sarajevo Film Festival’s Masterclass Aug. 17-21. The series features intimate hour-long conversations with award-winning international filmmakers and actors. Featured speakers include Michel Hazanavicius, Director (“The Artist,” “The Search”) & SFF 2020 jury president; Bérénice Bejo, Actor, (“The Artist,” “The Search”); Michel Franco, writer, director and producer (“Chronic,”
China’s leading online music firm Tencent Music Entertainment pointed to increased investment as the reason for a no better than flat performance in the first half of the year. Revenues for the April to June quarter were RMB6.93 billion ($981 million), an increase of 18% year-over-year, and up 14% to RMB13.2 billion for the first six
Disney confirmed Monday that its live-action “Mulan” has been approved to release in Chinese cinemas “soon,” making China the most significant territory where the film will receive a theatrical outing. It has not yet been granted an official release date in the Middle Kingdom. The U.S. company clearly tried hard to strike the right tone
Want to impress your date by fighting off her molestor? Wish your stand-up comedy act would bring the house down? Or looking to pack your grumpy grandpa’s funeral with keening mourners? Call “Special Actors,” an agency that supplies performers to help you keep up with the Suzukis — or out-scam your scammers. The third feature
MeidasTouch, a progressive Democratic PAC founded by brothers Ben, Brett and Jordan Meiselas, has released an LGBTQ+-targeted ad under the banner “Enough is Enough.” The group has partnered with Vote Proud, a voting initiative for the LGBTQ community founded by Bruce Roberts, Lisa Halliday and Jake Resnicow and co-chaired by Sharon Stone, Elton John and
Wildly uneven but sporadically affecting, Bobby Roth’s “Pearl” is a curiously disjointed drama that relies on the compelling performances of veteran actor Anthony LaPaglia and promising newcomer Larsen Thompson for most of its emotional impact. A few abrupt narrative transitions indicate that some scenes, for whatever reason, must have been discarded during the editing process.
DC Comics and streaming service DC Universe have been impacted by parent company WarnerMedia’s corporate realignment, with layoffs at both units. But a source tells Variety that through WarnerMedia’s streamlining efforts, the DC brand will actually be expanding, with DC chief creative officer Jim Lee overseeing creative of all DC-related growth in the company. At
DJ iMarkKeyz, who famously remixed Cardi B’s coronavirus rant back in March, has taken on Ben Shapiro’s straight-faced lyric recitation of “WAP,” the NSFW (or even WFH) track by Cardi and Megan Thee Stallion, which dropped on Friday (Aug. 7). The Brooklyn-born and bred iMarkKeyz, whose real name is Brandon Davidson, is a local DJ
Universal Music Group (UMG) announced Monday that it has signed multi-year direct licensing agreements in China with both Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) and its competitor NetEase Cloud Music, breaking the past precedent of signing exclusively with the former. The move signals a shake-up in the major labels’ approach to the Chinese market. Until now, UMG,
Wassim “Sal” Slaiby, CEO of SAL&CO and XO Records and manager of The Weeknd, Doja Cat and French Montana, among others, is helping raise money to aid victims of the Beirut explosion. Slaiby was born in Lebanon and immigrated to Canada as a teenager. He and his wife, Rima Fakih Slaiby, the first Arab-American Miss
MONDAY, AUG. 10 Drive-in Screenings Scheduled for Outfest Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ Film Festival will hold drive-in screenings at the Calamigos Ranch in Malibu, launching with the Los Angeles premiere of Sundance 2020 title “The Nowhere Inn,” starring Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein. The 11-day festival kicks off Aug. 20. and features more than 160
The most surefire way to make people interested in a product is to ban it from circulation. ABC found this out the hard way in 2018 when it pulled an episode of “Black-ish” (“Please, Baby, Please”) from its schedule less than a week before it was due to air, which all but guaranteed that it
In the era of social distancing, watching movies on streaming services has become everyone’s plan for Friday night (or every night). The first decision is picking a platform: Netflix? Hulu? Amazon Prime? HBO Max? YouTube? The list goes on. But even then, it can be hard to know which movie to watch — and on
Amid the greater restructuring happening at AT&T-owned WarnerMedia, Warner Bros. Television Group is realigning its scripted and unscripted TV production operations, merging Warner Bros. Television and Warner Horizon Scripted TV to create a new division. The scripted units will be led by WBTV presidents Susan Rovner and Brett Paul, while Warner Bros. unscripted and alternative
Kurt Luedtke, who left journalism for Hollywood and won an Academy Award for his “Out of Africa” screenplay, died Sunday in Michigan after a long illness. He was 80. The Michigan native died at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, the Detroit Free Press reported. He had worked at the newspaper starting in 1965 and was
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