Making Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights helped Chu figure out what he’s trying to say with his films. Through them, he’s arguing for telling fresh stories via beloved, old-school Hollywood styles. But he also wants to do more than entertain; he wants to help audiences reflect on their own connections to what’s happening on screen. - The...
With Cannes on the verge of reigniting international festival activity and Telluride keen on reclaiming the Oscar influencer throne, festivals are mobilizing to become the frontlines for an industry that must assess an uncertain future. - IndieWire
"It was an issue, if not the big issue, that writers across Hollywood had to face: how to plan a season amid an evolving crisis. Would their universe feature COVID-19, see it in the rearview mirror or pretend it never even happened? And if featured, what would that world even look like? It's not as though any of them...
The award-winning, beleaguered dissident — famous recently for his dance and opera productions — is also a filmmaker, and he has a new title, Petrov's Flu, in competition at Cannes this year. He wrote the screenplay while under house arrest pending trial on an embezzlement cased widely considered to be trumped-up; he was convicted on that charge last June...
"I do feel proud that as a woman in the film industry in her mid-40s, having been doing this job since I was 17, that I'm being given this space to fully embrace all of these changes that life's years have left my face and body with." - BBC
"The number of podcasts … ballooned, filling voids in the professional lives of the hosts and the social lives of the listeners, and in some cases replacing both. There were periods during lockdown where I was hearing more from certain podcasters than anyone else on Earth – even the people I was sharing a home with. But believing that...
"Revenues of public television and radio stations declined by $147 million, or 5%, in fiscal year 2020, which included the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to CPB's latest State of the System analysis. The steepest losses in fiscal 2020 were in underwriting, foundation funding and investment income, … individual giving revenue was the only income source...
Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You did win two awards - best mini-series and leading actress, which Coel dedicated to the production's intimacy director: "Thank you for your existence in our industry, for making the space safe for creating physical, emotional, and professional boundaries so that we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of power,...
The show, whose third season, and run, ended on Sunday night, was set at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the gay and trans subcultures in New York. And yet, it wasn't about Capital-T Tragedy. - Slate
The movie has been in development since 2008. "The project stalled for many years between different directors and studios, because executives wanted more well-known Latino actors to star, such as Shakira or Jennifer Lopez. They also wanted more stereotypical storylines for the characters, such as pregnancies and gang violence." But Hamilton changed all that. - NBC
The newspaper crisis - and be assured, for small, local places, it is a crisis - means that areas where people need the most are getting covered the least. - LitHub
The government review of the planned Discovery-Warner Bros merger could take more than a year, and subscribers are abandoning Discovery's cable channels (and cable in general) in droves. Then there's the huge debt - and the companies' culture clashes. - Los Angeles Times
You don't have to wait for news reports; just watch livestreams from protests, lectures, concerts, and more. "With endless images and videos at our constant disposal, people are entirely able to form their own understanding of events—and of the narrative choices involved in crafting newspaper articles and cable network broadcasts." This is great, and terrible, for journalism and the...
