More from Rebecca Keegan
How Modern Hollywood Doomed Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media Dream
At the Oscars in 2019, one production company was at the center of the year’s most talked about films and on the cusp of the industry’s sweeping trends. The man who backed it, however, wasn’t at the ceremony. That year the films made by Participant Media collected 17 Oscar nominations, for Green Book, which eventually […]
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‘Rust’ Armorer’s GoFundMe Shut Down for Violating Rules Against Raising Money for Legal Defense of “Violent Crimes”
GoFundMe has shut down the fundraiser that Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed‘s family started to help pay for the cost of an appeal because it violated the company’s rules against raising money for “the legal defense of alleged financial and violent crimes.” The family had launched the fundraiser ahead of Gutierrez-Reed’s scheduled sentencing for involuntary manslaughter […]
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The Renegade Director Reclaiming Amy Winehouse’s Soul
When Sam Taylor-Johnson started working on her Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black, she asked screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh to listen to one of Winehouse’s tracks, “Tears Dry on Their Own,” before he started writing. “I kept saying in those early days, ‘I feel like this song is our path to understanding her,’ ” Taylor-Johnson says. In […]
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Comedy Queen Kristen Wiig Is Back With a New Life, Glam Look and Star-Packed Series
A few weeks before this year’s Golden Globes, Kristen Wiig went over to Will Ferrell’s house in L.A. to brainstorm how they might co-present an acting prize at the show, which was reinventing itself as new and improved after a series of scandals. The event was among the first major Hollywood gatherings since the actors […]
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Al Pacino Says Awkward Best Picture Delivery Was “a Choice by Producers”
Al Pacino’s unconventional delivery of the 2024 Oscars’ best picture winner Sunday night had some people in the audience wondering if the Godfather star was winging it with Oscar tradition, but Pacino says he was largely following the Academy’s own script. “There seems to be some controversy about my not mentioning every film by name […]
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The Second Coming of Megan Ellison
In early 2021, Megan Ellison emerged from a self-imposed Hollywood exile and did something she hadn’t done in over a year: She signed on to back a movie, Nimona. There was a time when this would not have been remarkable, when Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures was producing five films a year and she was considered the […]
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Why Megan Ellison Saved ‘Nimona’: “I Needed This Movie”
In January of 2021, Megan Ellison got a call from Erik Lomis, the former head of distribution at her company, Annapurna Pictures, asking if she’d like to take a look at a movie whose filmmakers needed a lifeline. Disney was days away from announcing that it planned to shutter Blue Sky Studios, the 500-person, Greenwich, […]
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Is the Embattled Young ‘Rust’ Armorer Getting a Fair Shot?
On Oct. 21, 2021, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, then 24, arrived at the Bonanza Creek Ranch just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, an hour or so before sunrise and reported to her job as the armorer and props assistant on the set of the low-budget indie Western Rust. She took a COVID test, swung by the catering […]
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U.S. ‘Avatar’ Workers Vote to Unionize In Boost for VFX Organizing Effort
U.S.-based visual effects artists who help bring James Cameron’s Avatar epics to life have voted to unionize in a National Labor Relations Board election. Of an eligible 88 workers at Walt Disney Studios subsidiary TCF US Productions 27, Inc. who assist with productions for Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, 57 voted to join the union and 19 […]
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The Rare Hollywood Interview Where Celebs Actually Get Real (While Sweating It Out): ‘Hiking With Kevin’
In 2017, Kevin Nealon and his friend Matthew Modine were huffing and puffing their way up a steep grade in Temescal Canyon, a tranquil trail that’s a kind of unofficial backyard for many industry figures on L.A.’s Westside. Their breathless conversation amused Nealon, so he whipped out his iPhone and started recording. Among the oaks […]
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Amazon Labor Doc Tells David and Goliath Battle of Our Time
In March of 2020, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, an employee who led a walkout at its Staten Island, New York, warehouse known as JFK8 over pandemic working conditions. A memo that later was leaked to Vice News revealed that an Amazon executive dismissed Smalls as “not smart or articulate” in a strategy meeting with Jeff […]
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‘The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’ Is Having a Moment
Perhaps it was when Jennifer Lawrence reenacted a scene from The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City season four closer on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, calling the episode “the best finale I have ever seen on reality TV.” Maybe it was when California Congressman Robert Garcia quoted Housewife Heather Gay’s diva-caliber finale […]
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