Notably, Better Call Saul didn’t win a single Emmy. Ted Lasso, which had previously won Outstanding Comedy Series in 2021 and 2022, received no Emmys.

Notable Quotes:

Jennifer Coolidge (Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series: The White Lotus):

“I love the evil gays…Okay, one last thing. I had a little dream in my little town, and everyone said it was impractical, and that it was a far-fetched, but it did happen after all, so don’t give up on your dream.”

Niecy Nash-Betts (Best Supporting Actress: Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story):

“And you know who I want to thank? I want to thank me. For believing in me. And doing what they said I could not do. And I want to say to myself in front of all you beautiful people. Go on, girl, with your bad self.”

Steven Yeun (Best Actor Limited Series: Beef):

“And there were days when it was difficult to live in [my character] Danny’s skin. Sometimes I wanted to judge him, sometimes I wanted to make fun of him. And [our on-set photographer] pulled me aside, and he’s like, never bail on Danny. And thanks, I wanna say thank you to Danny for teaching me that judgment and shame is a lonely place, but compassion and grace is where we can all meet.”

For More:

The It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia cast riffs on how they’ve never been nominated for an Emmy. Clip.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler return for an SNL Weekend Update – Emmy’s edition. Clip.

The Emmy’s new policy for long speeches…with a maternal twist.

THE INDUSTRY NEWS

*Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story*. Netflix.

Netflix’s Monster. The inaugural season of Ryan Murphy’s Monster featured the terrifyingly even-keeled Evan Peters portraying Jeffrey Dahmer’s horrific acts of cannibalism (trailer). The series, which snatched an Emmy last night, currently Netflix’s 3rd most popular English-language show, returns with a new season featuring Javier Barden (No Country For Old Men) and Chloë Sevigny (Bones and All, American Psycho). They will portray the real-life couple José and Kitty Menendez, who were murdered by their children.

Since the Serial podcast and Making of a Murderer (2015) spurred the resurgence of highly digestible, can’t look away true-crime series being produced, the trend has continued to accelerate.

Recently, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace (trailer) ranked #1 on Max and hit 10M viewers.

Netflix has already renewed Monster for a third installment. The second season will premiere later this year.

Lionsgate’s new leadership. Last week, it was announced that Joe Drake, Lionsgate Chairman, was replaced by Adam Fogelson, who joined the company in 2022 from STX Entertainment. Lionsgate had a disappointing 2023; they ranked behind Universal, Disney, Warner Bros, Sony, and Paramount for box-office revenue. In an attempt to make their company as attractive as possible for potential buyers, they’ve tried to spin-off as a separately traded “pure-content” entity with Screaming Eagle Equity Partners, which allows for a $4.6B price tag and an easier split from Starz.

The Lionsgate Studios deal is expected to be finalized in the spring. As their price tag is considered relatively low, there’s the possibility that Apple or Netflix could purchase the studio in a similar style to when Amazon bought MGM for $8.45 bn in 2022.

THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT

*Last Tango in Paris*. United Artists. Italian poster. US poster is NSFW.

Matt Dillon is Marlon Brando. Last Tango in Paris (1972) is a powerfully erotic tour-de-force that tore down the screen (trailer). It was hyper-controversial at the time, banned in multiple countries, but a masterpiece by the director Bernardo Bertolucci.

Now a biopic, Being Maria, details the troubled production that left Maria Schneider, Brando’s on-screen lover, brutalized.

Dillon discussed the challenge of playing Brando in French:

“I also have a real love for Marlon Brando, and he’s been with me since I started acting. He’s always been with me, [while Last Tango in Paris] had a profound effect because of the personal nature of [Brando’s] very courageous performance. So that was the temptation. Of course, there were times I was going, ‘You idiot, how can you even [dare?]’”

Although Dillon had a small role in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, he has continued to take on niche festival film roles like in American Dreamer (Tribeca Film Festival, 2022) and Land of Dreams (Venice Film Festival, 2021).

Being Maria is currently in post-production. Orange Studio (The Father) is handling international sales.

Marlon Wayans: from Scary Movie to prestige horror. Wayans lit up the screen with his innocent yet electric performance in Requiem for a Dream (2000, clip). He then transitioned to comical but critically ridiculed movies:

Recently, he’s acted across Matt Damon in Air (2023) as a more serious character actor (clip).

He will now star in Goat by director Justin Tipping, whose 2016 debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, Kicks (trailer) was criminally underrated.

Here’s the Goat official summary:

It follows a promising athlete who is invited to train with the star of the team who is about to retire.

Not too much meat, but Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw (Get Out, Nope), who has a first-look deal with Universal, will produce. So it’s going to be killer.

Jeremy Allen White has given us nothing but manic intensity as the star chef of the fledgling Chicago restaurant in The Bear.

Accepting the award for best actor last night, he became overwhelmed with joy:

“I am so proud. I am so full of gratitude to be standing in front of you all. I love this show so much. It filled me up. It-It gave me a passionate- set of fire in me to match the beautiful work done by Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo [the show runners].”

White has had a career-defining year, playing the at-once effervescent yet deeply distributed Von Erich brother in The Iron Claw and a softer role in Fingernails (clip).

The next season of The Bear will air sometime in 2024. Here’s hoping for more celeb cameos and claustrophobic fridge sequences.

FESTIVALS

*Fruitvale Station*. The Weinstein Company.

The Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab is the pinnacle of indie prestige. Previously selected projects include:

Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013)
The Daniels’ Swiss Army Man (2016)

Here are two stand-out projects pulled from this year’s selections:

Hanna Gray Organschi (Writer-Director) with Rubber Hut:

Rhode Island, 1992. An entrepreneurial ex–Pan Am stewardess opens a drive-thru condom shop in her Italian Catholic town. Overnight, Emanuella DelVecchio becomes the local lightning rod, a radical hero to the neighborhood teens and an unlikely threat to her tight-knit community.

Sara Crow (Co-Writer, Co-Director) and David Rafailedes (Co-Writer, Co-Director) with Satoshi (U.S.A.):

The potentially true story of a teenage anime-obsessed hacktivist who, after losing her scholarship to Stanford, returns home to Arizona to become the mysterious inventor of a new digital currency called Bitcoin.

Crow is a Martin Scorsese Scholar and a Sloan Feature Film Award recipient.

Satoshi may offer a humanistic perspective on the Bitcoin craze, which, given the subject’s popularity, may solidify it as a break-out success.

The full list for Sundance Screenwriter Lab 2024 may be found here.

TECH SECTION

AI at Sundance. Eno, a documentary about the experimental music legend Brian Eno, who collaborated with David Bowie, U2, and the Talking Heads, uses generative AI to create a different set of visuals every time the movie is screened.

Here’s the Sundance’s official description from director Gary Hustwit:

This innovative bio-doc also elevates the documentary form to become an evergreen, algorithmic performance. Hustwit and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed a bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno.

As the world of film becomes saturated with generative AI tools, the medium will struggle to keep its hard-won SAG-AFTRA and WGA AI regulations as the primary deterrents for the use of the technology.

INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT

Lee Sung Jin won three Emmys for Beef (Best Drama Series, Best Writing, and Best Directing). His butterfly effect road rage saga was spurred by his personal crisis with life and death.

When Lee first got to Los Angeles, he had it pretty rough.

He explained during his Emmy acceptance speech:

“You know, when I first moved to LA, my bank account went to the negative by 63 cents. So I had to deposit a dollar bill into my account to avoid the overdraft fee. And the ATM screen said, are you sure you want to deposit one dollar? And I was like, no. I wasn’t sure of anything back then.”

He went on to praise the amazing community of folks that had held him together.

His subsequent speeches last night touched on his struggle with mental health. It was wonderfully vulnerable—a class act.

A24 executive launches Latino-focused production company. Sergio Lira has an excellent pedigree:

2013 – Indian Paint Brush
- Development Intern
2015-2016 – APA
- Assistant
2016-2017 – FilmNation Entertainment
- Assistant
2017 – 2019 – Amazon (Hanna)
- Development Coordinator of Original Drama Series
2019 – 2022 – A24
- Development, Production & Acquisitions

Lira and co-CEO Lynette Coll, who was previously Head of Development at Gamechanger Films (Passing) stated:

“We aim to work with as many of the current buyers and studios but are no longer waiting or relying on them to decide when our films get made. We’re dedicated to ushering in a new era of high-caliber Latin-American cinema.”

The outfit aims to have 3-4 projects in production by the end of the year. Their first project, The Summers, will premiere at Sundance this week.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Grace Hughes-Hallett produced one of Sundance’s most riveting documentaries, Three Identical Strangers (2018). That film centered on the real-life case of triplets separated at birth and reunited as teenagers through chance. But what seems to be a saccharine tale takes a tragic turn (trailer). Hughes-Hallett is now making her directorial debut with the documentary The Secret Of Me (w/t).

She discussed the synopsis, which covers similar territory:

“A medical scandal that started in America in the 1960s and exploded into the public eye in the 2000s. The consequences for thousands of young children would be devastating. For one young student, it would change her life forever… her search to understand who she is leads her to a radical experiment on a pair of identical twins and a terrible lie.”

Film4 commissioned the Secret Of Me (w/t). Dogwoof (Free Solo, The Act of Killing) is handling distribution.

Netflix’s Supersex is a loose history of porn star Rocco Siffredi, the top Italian adult entertainment actor. The teaser trailer is titillating, but it leans more toward the pleasures of the porn industry than the demons. The latter is best portrayed by Boogie Nights. Siffredi is said to have battled some severe sex addiction over the years, which challenged his marriage. If the series taps into some of that darkness that Shame (2011) achieved, it could be a foreign language hit.

The film has been selected for the Berlinale Special. The series will be released on Netflix on March 6th.

ON THIS DAY

1962. Shooting begins on Dr. No, the first James Bond film.

See you tomorrow!

Written by Gabriel Miller. Research by Spencer Carter.

Editor: Gabriel Miller.

filed under: Daily Edition

Share the Post:

Other Editions

Coming for Clint Eastwood

Good morning: In today’s edition of The Industry, we look at: A Fistful of Remakes, Lionsgate’s King Arthur, Universal’s jaded

Brad Pitt’s Need For Speed

Good morning: In today’s edition of The Industry, we look at: Devil Wears Prada sequel, Paramount’s plusses and minuses, Glenn