Month: March 2021

With the Grammy Awards coming up on Sunday, it’s remarkable that interim Recording Academy president/CEO Harvey Mason, jr. has time to talk with the press — although that could have been said at virtually any point in the past 14 months. Suddenly dropped into the job after Deborah Dugan’s surprise ouster in January, Mason has
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Associated Newspapers, publisher of U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail, has written to ViacomCBS over alleged distortion of newspaper headlines in the bombshell Oprah Winfrey interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Variety has confirmed. In a letter obtained by Variety that was also sent to OWN and ITV, Associated Newspapers wrote to CBS head of
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Apple TV Plus has ordered a docuseries from the team behind “McMillion$,” Emmy-nominated filmmakers James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte, about the memorable 1996 TV commercial that advertised a Harrier Jet in exchange for seven million Pepsi points. Hernandez and Lazarte will direct and executive produce “The Jet” through their FunMeter banner. The Jet” will
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AT&T has refined its pitch to Wall Street on the rationale for owning WarnerMedia. As it approaches the third anniversary of completing its $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner, the telco giant held an Investor Day presentation Friday morning that was long on talk of “software-based entertainment” and global subscriber predictions for the next four
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For Jhené Aiko, a Grammy nominee in three categories, songwriting and healing are cosmically connected. No, really: For her album of the year contender “Chilombo,” the 32-year-old singer-songwriter incorporated crystal sound bowls or “singing bowls” — a Tibetan tradition in which the round vessels, when played, vibrate at a certain frequency connected to a chakra — into
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Variety’s seventh annual Artisans Awards celebrates those essential to the filmmaking process and who have exhibited the most exciting and innovative work of the year in their respective fields. The tribute evening will take place in a virtual ceremony on Monday, April 5 that will stream on the Santa Barbara Film Festival website. Variety’s Senior
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Jongnic Bontemps might just qualify as the unofficial composer of the Black Lives Matter movement. No fewer than four major documentaries on African American subjects — airing now, or soon, on CNN, Netflix, National Geographic and Amazon Prime — feature scores written by the Brooklyn-born, L.A.-based composer. “I asked the universe for this,” Bontemps admits.
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In criminal cases, wiretapped phone conversations are commanding pieces of evidence (juries love them), and in documentaries about crime they tend to be some of the most gripping. We hear people as they really are. In “Allen v. Farrow,” the tapes of Woody Allen in phone conversations secretly recorded by Mia Farrow present an oily
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Hailey Rhode Bieber is launching her own YouTube channel with OBB Pictures. The model and host’s channel launches Friday, and will feature a wide range of short-form content, including lifestyle tips, beauty tutorials, social causes and a talk show called “Who’s in My Bathroom?” — a show hosted from Bieber’s own bathroom in her home
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Raven Banner Entertainment announced it has completed production on Rue Morgue Magazine founder Rodrigo Gudiño’s “The Breach,” marking a reunion with former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, who serves as the film’s executive producer and co-producer of the score. Based on a book by horror novelist Nick Cutter (born Craig Davidson), with a screenplay co-penned
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Taylor Swift gave a small spoken preview of her Grammy performance on Sunday in a post on CBS’s Twitter account, revealing that she’s reuniting with two of the collaborators who helped her make her nominated album “Folklore.” She revealed that in preparation for the performance, the three have quarantined together in a house for the entire
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Director-producer Dorián Fernández Moris,  the leading light on an genre production scene based out of Iquitos in the heart of the Amazon, is set to produce “The Sugar Girl,” a slice of Amazon Noir aimed squarely at international markets. Mixing a cop drama-thriller and doses of Amazon legend and the supernatural, “The Sugar Girl” will
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Mexican-American filmmaker Sofia Garza-Barba made waves with her award-winning short film “Death After Pancakes,” taking prizes at the Independent Filmmakers Showcase and Lady Filmmakers Film Festival, and has shared with Variety that it’s time to announce her debut feature outing, a supernatural fairy tale thriller “Santos Remedios,” pitching at this month’s Sanfic-Morbido Lab. “Santos Remedios”
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