Who shot Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls? It’s crazy to think that a Hollywood movie can solve a homicide the Los Angeles Police Department couldn’t crack. But conspiracy-minded “City of Lies” — which opens 24 years and 10 days after the rap legend’s murder on March 9, 1997 — suggests that the Notorious B.I.G.’s death
admin
One of the many remarkable things about first time Grammy executive producer Ben Winston and Recording Academy chief Harvey Mason jr. is that they basically haven’t stopped working since the show ended on Sunday night. Winston opens our chat by saying, “Oh, I’m straight back at it — I’ve done three ‘Late Late Shows’ since
The Academy Awards are over a month away, and the show’s details have been a drip-drip as the season presents various challenges for award shows and ratings. In a letter to this year’s Oscar nominees, the show’s producers, Emmy nominee Jesse Collins (“Zoboomafoo”), Oscar nominee Stacey Sher (“Django Unchained” and “Erin Brockovich”) and Oscar winner
“The Crown” was already among Netflix’s most-viewed originals — and the recent palace intrigue involving Meghan Markle and Prince Harry helped drive interest in the show about the British royal family even higher among American audiences. Another big factor fueling the recent bump for “The Crown” was its win for best drama television series at
Damon Wayans Jr. has signed on to star in “Kill the Orange-Faced Bear,” the TBS comedy pilot about a man bent on revenge after a bear eats his girlfriend. Wayans Jr., whose credits include the much-beloved “Happy Endings” as well as his disappearance and then reappearance on the hit “New Girl,” will be joined by
UPDATED: Kenny Wayne Shepherd is no longer a contender for this year’s Blues Music Awards, due to controversy over his “Dukes of Hazzard” replica car and its Confederate flag imagery, which had been recently been called out by concerned and angry members of the sponsoring Blues Foundation organization. The Blues Foundation also announced that Ken
The NFL season ended weeks ago, but some of the media’s biggest players have been scrambling to keep professional football in the spotlight. Under a series of critically important rights deals unveiled Thursday between the National Football League and some of the nation’s biggest media companies, “” will no longer be shown on broadcast TV
UPDATED: The anonymous woman who first made allegations about Armie Hammer on social media has come forward publicly. “I thought that he was going to kill me,” the woman, named Effie, said through tears on Thursday during a press conference with her attorney, Gloria Allred. Effie is accusing Hammer of violent rape and physical abuse,
Besides boosting artists’ egos, Sunday night’s Grammy Awards gave a real leap to a number of performers’ sales and streaming figures, according to a report from Rolling Stone that measured the immediate impact on numbers for some of the best-known and least-known musicians of the evening. The exposure benefitted everyone from stars like Megan Thee
Vera Farmiga has been cast in a lead role of the Apple drama series “Five Days at Memorial,” Variety has learned. The series is based on the Sheri Fink novel of the same name. It chronicles the first five days in a New Orleans, LA, hospital after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. When the floodwaters rose, the
Showtime is developing a limited series about the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The show hails from Billy Ray and Shane Salerno, who previously worked on the Showtime series “The Comey Rule.” Ray will write the series in addition to directing, with Salerno executive producing. Josh McLaughlin will also executive produce, with Showtime
“Happily” is what happens when a cute conceit goes nowhere intriguing. Writer-director BenDavid Grabinski’s feature debut tries to generate comedic menace and mystery from the aftermath of a bizarre encounter between a preternaturally lovey-dovey California couple and an enigmatic stranger, but there’s nothing particularly amusing or suspenseful about the weirdness that ensues. Stranding a host
There’s a pointed takedown of very-online living fighting to emerge from the many zany, bloody distractions of “Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break,” though even if it succeeded, it probably wouldn’t be all that fresh. Wringing bleak comedy from the psychological collapse of a naive middle-aged man chasing talent-show glory, this uneven sophomore feature from director
Former production accountant Rumala Sheikhani was working on the TV show “State of Affairs,” paying the background cast, when one day the stacks of paperwork seemed to mock the sustainability Hollywood strives for. “There had to be a better way of doing it,” she says. The key was finding a way to streamline the system
One week before Alexi McCammond was to start as editor-in-chief of Condé Nast’s Teen Vogue, she has agreed to “part ways” with the company over racist tweets she had posted as a teenager a decade ago. Condé Nast announced the appointment of McCammond, formerly a political reporter at Axios, to the EIC spot at the
Matthew McConaughey is attached to star in a series adaptation of the John Grisham novel “A Time for Mercy,” which is currently in development at HBO, Variety has learned from sources. The book, published in 2020, is a followup to Grisham’s books “A Time to Kill” and “Sycamore Row,” all of which center on the character
The CW has cast the lead for “Naomi,” the pilot based on the DC Comics character of the same name. In addition, the pilot has added three series regulars. The pilot hails from from Ava DuVernay and Jill Blankenship. Kaci Walfall will star in the title role as Naomi, described as an effortlessly cool and confident
ABC’s new Krista Vernoff drama “Rebel” is generating a lot of buzz. According to numbers provided by the network, the trailer for the new show has been viewed more than 27 million times across multiple video and social media channels. That puts the “Rebel” promo well ahead of the network’s most watched trailers from the
There’s a moment deep into “Aretha” that encapsulates why the third season of National Geographic’s “Genius” series chose Aretha Franklin as its latest brilliant subject of study. As with many of the show’s most effective scenes, it takes place in the recording studio with Aretha (Cynthia Erivo) listening intently to her surrounding band before directing
Aaron Sorkin is widely considered the king of film and TV dialogue. Actors line up for a chance to feast on his words and the opportunity to deliver a Sorkin-penned speech. And yet his monologues never seem out of place; they fit organically into his stories and his characters. Sorkin says there’s a musicality to
The showrunner of “Key & Peele” filed a class action lawsuit on Thursday accusing the Writers Guild of America of agreeing to a secret deal that shorted him out of streaming residuals from the show. Shortly after the show ended its five-year run in 2015, Comedy Central made the entire series — more than 300
In one week, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s nuclear CBS interview with Oprah Winfrey became a global television event that toppled incendiary presenter Piers Morgan from “Good Morning Britain” and now leaves a sizeable question mark over Sharon Osbourne’s future as a co-host at “The Talk.” But it’s the war of words being played out
Ernest Hemingway famously once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” What Papa Hemingway meant, of course, is that the craft of writing is emotional, draining and often psychologically taxing, especially when mining stories that bring to the fore crucial social issues such as racism,
Now that Oscar noms are in and planning for the 93rd Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre and Union Station is underway, I’m hoping the next announcement we hear is that the evening will serve as a fundraiser for COVID relief. Following the Academy’s $6 million donation last April to The Actors Fund, the Motion
It was a really big deal this week that more than 100 of Hollywood’s most powerful public relations firms told the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. they would urge their high-profile clients to avoid working with the organization until it can “swiftly manifest profound and lasting change” to address its longtime discriminatory, unethical and corrupt practices.
Almost inevitably, Hollywood will help shape the cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic. But how? Several quarantine films have already come out, but they haven’t quite hit the mark. They emphasize social isolation, while foregrounding their production constraints, or delve into disaster tropes, like the much-panned “Songbird.” It will take some time — and the
With the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. mired in a scandal over its lack of Black members and shoddy ethical practices, many in show business are wondering if the Golden Globes have permanently lost their luster. According to top film executives, agents and celebrity wranglers, studios and stars aren’t quite ready to tell the HFPA to
Vertical Entertainment has landed North American and U.K. rights to “We Broke Up,” a romantic comedy starring William Jackson Harper of “The Good Place” fame and “You’re the Worst” actor Aya Cash. The movie, written and directed by Jeff Rosenberg, is slated to premiere in theaters and on demand on April 23. “We’re thrilled to
DJ Cassidy, whose popular “Pass the Mic” all-star video jams were most recently part of the Biden/Harris inaugural programs, has made a deal with BET to produce six “Mic” specials during 2021, all of them set to follow the network’s annual awards shows or other major programming. The first of the six, dubbed “DJ Cassidy’s
Just under a year ago, Live Nation, the world’s largest live-entertainment company, launched Crew Nation, a charitable fund to which it contributed an initial $5 million donation, to help support concert crews around the world. It would then match the next $5 million given by artists, fans and employees dollar for dollar. The company announced today that