Liza Minnelli is getting ready to be photographed for the cover of Variety. She’s wearing an off-the-shoulder black beaded shirtdress and perched on a director’s chair. As she adjusts herself, trying to find the right position to extend her bare legs, she screeches, “I’m getting f—ed by a chair!” As if on cue, the room
“I never should have written ‘Hip to be Square’ in the third-person,” says Huey Lewis of the News fame. The man who has sold more than 30 million records, spawning such ‘80s classics as “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “I Want a New Drug,” the Oscar-nominated “The Power of Love” and the song he’s
In the second quarter since all of Sony Music’s operations were united under CEO Rob Stringer, the company showed strong earnings, ending the calendar year with streaming revenues up 21% and overall revenue up 7.5% to $1.99 billion. Its profits for the quarter reached $333 million. Driven by releases from Harry Styles, Lil Nas X,
MADRID — Rolling off the success of “El Pueblo” on both Spain’s Amazon Prime Video and Telecinco, the main commercial channel of top Spanish broadcast network Mediaset España, the U.S. online giant has clinched pay/TV and SVOD rights to four Mediaset España dramas and two docu series. The deal was clinched by Amazon Prime Video
David Kessler, a well-respected French media industry veteran who had been heading the content division of the telco group Orange since 2014, died on Feb. 3 at his home in Paris. He was 60. Kessler’s death was confirmed by his family to the newswire AFP. The cause of his death hasn’t been reported but sources
After signing pacts with Altice’s SFR in August and Free in October, Amazon Prime Video has scored a distribution deal with another leading French telco group, Bouygues Telecom. Amazon Prime Video will be distributed on Bouygues’s android set-top boxes and will be included in the telco’s plan priced at €5.99 ($6.62) a month. Amazon Prime
People magazine is joining celebrity-texting service — a bid to reach readers directly with updates, news alerts and other content in a new way. The Meredith-owned personality and pop-culture title is the first media partner for Community, a startup whose backers include Salesforce.com and Ashton Kutcher. People mag will kick off its pact with Community
February 4, 2020 4:20AM PT A second season of the Japanese adaptation of hit drama show “Suits” has been green-lighted at leading broadcaster Fuji Television. NBCUniversal Formats, which handled the deal, says that it is the first time ever that a U.S. drama adaptation is renewed. Production of the second season will begin this month,
ViacomCBS Networks International, the international arm of ViacomCBS, has announced that its free, ad-supported streaming service Pluto TV will launch in Latin America at the end of March, with the service expected to reach Brazil by the end of the year. The platform will offer programming in Spanish and Portuguese, and it will be available
Ian Bonhôte, a double BAFTA nominee for the feature documentary “McQueen,” has attached as the director on narrative feature “Faithfull,” about the singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull. Altitude has acquired worldwide sales rights. As previously reported, Lucy Boynton, who played Mary Austin in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and appears in Ryan Murphy’s “The Politician” for Netflix, stars as Faithfull.
British comedian and actor Matt Lucas will voice the lead role in “Molesworth,” an animated film adaptation of the best-selling series of boarding school books written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle. Lupus Films and Melusine Productions, the producers behind the acclaimed animated feature “Ethel & Ernest,” will team up with Uli Meyer
American playwright and filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, French actor and “The Artist” star Bérénice Bejo, and Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir will serve on the International Jury of the Berlin Film Festival. The other jury members are German producer Bettina Brokemper, Italian actor Luca Marinelli, and programmer, film critic and director Kleber Mendonça Filho from Brazil. As
February 4, 2020 2:11AM PT Rodolphe Buet has joined Newen, the TF1 Group-owned production and distribution company, as head of distribution. Buet is joining Newen from On Entertainment (“Playmobil”) where he worked as head of the film division for two years. The executive previously held a 12-year tenure at Studiocanal as president of international distribution
European pay TV company Sky is planning to go net zero carbon by 2030 by transforming the way it does business, the company announced on Tuesday. In order to achieve that goal it will implement a sweeping range of green initiatives that will impact everything from the way its programs are produced to the relationships
Exclusive TMZ/Getty Composite R. Kelly‘s ex-girlfriend, Azriel Clary, already has the wheels in motion to not only help herself heal but to do the same for others … and her plan includes multimedia and advocacy. TMZ has learned about the next steps Azriel plans to take as she recovers from what she claims was a
For female filmmakers in the industry, this year’s round of Oscar nominations – in which acclaimed female-helmed films such as “Hustlers” and “The Farewell” were shut out in place of male-directed Best Picture nominees predominantly centred on stories of white men – told a frustratingly familiar story. But in the Academy’s non-fiction branch, a different
February 3, 2020 10:09PM PT The meteoric rise and contentious fall of the envelope-pushing 1990s cult cartoon series is charted in this lively documentary. For many the 1990s were the Age of Irony, with hipster cultural touchstones like Spy magazine and the TV show “Strangers With Candy” helping make snark the preferred flavor of the
Some movie stars level a kind of divinity that transcends personal preference — woe betide the dissenter who openly finds Audrey Hepburn cloying, or Cary Grant less than charming. That Bruce Lee had long ascended to that level of iron-clad cool was underlined by the biggest popular quibble with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,”
Results have been delayed in the Iowa caucus, as Democratic Party officials were seeking to reconcile “inconsistencies” in the tabulations. A state party official told reporters at 1 a.m. CT that the results would be released sometime on Tuesday. The candidates set about spinning the results based on their own internal data. Taking the stage
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched the fifth episode of “The Bachelor” Season 24. Monday night brought us the first of five (!!!) hours of “Bachelor” related content this week, where viewers picked up from the Alayah Benavidez controversy of last week’s “To Be Continued…” In the wise words of contestant
Fear of the spread of the coronavirus that is sweeping China has begun to contaminate the film industry in South Korea. Box office between Friday and Sunday dropped by 70% compared to last week’s 4-day holiday weekend and by 30% compared with the weekend before that. Though the virus may only be partly responsible. “We
A Change.org petition urging a boycott of the Beach Boys for co-headlining a safari hunters’ convention with Donald Trump Jr. this week has picked up a couple of notable signatories: two of the group’s founding members, Brian Wilson and Al Jardine. “It has been brought to my attention that on Wed., Feb. 5, the Beach
Given just how colossal the video game industry is, it’s pretty wild that more TV shows haven’t tried to delve deeper into it (except, of course, when in need of inspiration from some previously established and particularly valuable IP). But it’s maybe for the best that one of the first series to take it seriously
In today’s film news roundup, Nicolas Cage’s “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” and indie drama “Shooting Heroin” get release dates, the “Big Fur” documentary finds distribution and Ezra Miller forms a production company. RELEASE DATES Lionsgate has dated the Nicolas Cage movie “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” for March 19, 2021. Tom Gormican is
In today’s TV News Roundup, J.K. Simmons and Bruce Dern joined “Goliath” Season 4 and Netflix released a teaser for “I Am Not Okay With This.” CASTING J.K. Simmons and Bruce Dern have been cast as series regulars in the fourth and final season of Amazon‘s “Goliath.” Simmons will play George Zax, the head of
Netflix has canceled the figure skating drama “Spinning Out” after just one season, Variety has confirmed. The news comes just over a month after the show premiered on Jan 1. The 10-episode series follows Kat Baker (Kaya Scodelario), a talented, up-and-coming elite figure skater who’s ready to turn in her skates after a disastrous fall
February 3, 2020 3:00PM PT Following a thunderstorm of Oprah Winfrey-related controversy and a successful Sundance Film Festival premiere, “On the Record” has secured domestic distribution at HBO Max. A harrowing look at the struggle of women of color in the #MeToo movement, specifically those accusing hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons of rape and sexual assault,
“Lost” alumna Kiele Sanchez has joined the cast of the “Lincoln Lawyer” series from David E. Kelley at CBS. The show, based on the series of bestselling novels by Michael Connelly, received a series production commitment and hails from A+E Studios in association with CBS TV Studios. It centers around Mickey Haller, an iconoclastic idealist
Fox’s Super Bowl is done. ViacomCBS’ starts today. Viewers of any of 24 TV networks owned by the newly-merged media company Monday are likely to witness a promotional blitz for Super Bowl LV, which is slated for broadcast on CBS from Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Florida on February 7, 2021. The game may be
Facebook announced that Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, has been appointed to the company’s board. Houston founded Dropbox in 2007 with Arash Ferdowsi. The company’s storage service is used today by over 600 million people worldwide, including 14 million paying subscribers. Houston graduated from MIT in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical