Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Robert Duvall RIP, Paramount’s WBD? and AI Fiction.
Let’s go!
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“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Robert Duvall passed away this weekend at 95, leaving behind a towering legacy of iconic performances.
If you study Duvall in a scene, he somehow manages to be the most grounded and the most eccentric.
Matched with thunderous scene partners like Pacino in The Godfather or Sheen in Apocalypse Now, he kept his calm. Just recall how, in The Godfather Part II, when Pacino offers him the Don, he’s unwavering.
Duvall’s most memorable performance, though, was Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979). Because he reached molecular symbiosis with his environment. Kilgore is Vietnam. Vietnam is Kilgore. With his shirt off, it’s just another day at the beach. And when an explosion hits, he never flinched.
In fact, the only thing that breaks him is when he considers, “someday this war is going to end.”
His first two Oscar nominations came from these collaborations with Coppola, first as the Corleone family’s loyal but calculated consigliere, Tom Hagen, in The Godfather (1972) and later in Apocalypse Now (1979).
Duvall ended up taking the golden trophy home for Tender Mercies (1983), as a broken country singer seeking redemption, showing yet another more vulnerable side.
A truly transformative actor, his first film role was as the mysterious but gentle Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). In the shadows, almost without a word, he once again absorbed his environment and revealed a childlike purity.
He never chased stardom, but it followed him anyway. A chameleon, a massive influence, and undoubtedly one of the greats, his contribution to film as a whole is immeasurable.
For More:
Apocalypse Now Napalm scene
The Godfather scene
The Godfather Part II the Don scene
Tender Mercies trailer
To Kill a Mockingbird scene
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Seedance 2.0 says it will add safeguards after viral Pitt v. Cruise AI vids.
Paramount’s sweetened bid for WBD is reportedly swaying board members.
Dana Eden (co-creator: Tehran, Apple TV+) dies at 52.
Paramount’s Face/Off 2 loses director Adam Wingard.
Daniel Kaluuya attached to star in A24’s Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel.
E.T.'s Henry Thomas joins kidnapping drama Three People in the Woods.
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai joins Netflix’s Breakers.
Animated kids series Ivy Newt adds Michael Sheen.
Indie Spirit Awards: Netflix’s Train Dreams wins Best Feature + Best Director.
Berlinale Series Market: Fernando Meirelles launches limited series El Abuso.
Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary launches AI studio.
A24 + Lenny Abrahamson (dir: Room) reunite on a 1970s Dublin family drama.
Kerry Mondragon directing Mascotland w/ Billy Zane and Armie Hammer.
Producer David Kaplan (Josephine) tees up WWII drama Triumph of the Will.
Dark Sky Films buys N. America for folk-horror Blood Shine.
TODAY’S QUIZ
Yesterday’s correct answer: Ford v Ferrari almost starred Pitt and Cruise.
53% got it correct.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Seedance 2.0 has said it will introduce safeguards into its AI video tool that created the viral Brad Pitt vs. Tom Cruise vids.
This comes after Disney and Paramount sent cease-and-desist letters to the parent company ByteDance (owner: TikTok) that accused them of stealing IP.
Let’s hope ByteDance follows through on its promise.
After nine consecutive rejected bids, Paramount’s sweetened bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery seems to be swaying some board members. According to insiders, the WBD board is now considering the deal over Netflix’s offer, which they previously accepted.
We’ll see what happens, but this could easily spark another bidding war, pushing the share price well above Paramount's $30 offer for the whole company.
Mini Tidbits:
Dana Eden (co-creator of Apple TV+’s Tehran) has died at 52. This happened while filming S4 of the Emmy-winning series. No foul play is suspected. Eden, always hopeful, once shared the following while accepting the Emmy for Tehran, saying the show was about “understanding the human behind your enemy.”
Casey Wasserman, founder and CEO of Wasserman Agency (sports/music), will sell his company and step down amid his connections to Epstein. The agency will also change its name. At this point, the other talent agency he owns, Brillstein Entertainment Partners (clients: Brad Pitt, Sydney Sweeney), seems to be continuing as usual.
Paramount’s Face/Off 2 loses director Adam Wingard (dir: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire). No surprise, as Wingard’s latest film is a scaled-down A24 film called Onslaught. He may be looking to do more indie projects moving forward.
Apple is now allowing listeners to seamlessly switch between audio and video when enjoying their favorite podcasts. Following in the footsteps of Spotify and now Netflix, the new video features will launch this spring.
Trailer:
Universal’s Tutu (Doc)
Dir: Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI)
Premiere: Berlin
Release date:
Mubi’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Dir: Jane Schoenbrun
Cast: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson
Release: Aug 7
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Daniel Kaluuya can’t escape. The most memorable scene in Get Out was the haunting, sunken place sequence. Well, now Kaluuya is attached to star in a whole film seemingly in that place, A24’s Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel.
Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel centers on a man who wakes up in a mysterious hotel room and must escape.
This is from Michael Shanks (Dir: Neon’s Together starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco).
Seems perfectly claustrophobic for Kaluuya.
Henry Thomas has come a long way from E.T. Thomas is joining Katharine McPhee (Smash) in kidnapping drama Three People in the Woods from director Joshua Caldwell (Mending the Line). The feature follows a grieving couple who, for revenge, holds hostage the man responsible for their daughter’s death.
Thomas has had a somewhat burgeoning post ET career as of late, starring back to back horrors. Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023) and the Mike Flanagan murder mystery series The Fall of the House of Usher (2023).
His new thriller is an opportunity for him to flex his dramatic chops in a leading capacity.
Tidbits:
Emmy-nominated actor D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (FX’s Reservation Dogs) is joining Netflix’s Breakers, sharing the screen with The Boys’ Antony Starr. The Australian set series sees Woon-A-Tai as Elliot, a shy Rhode Island teen who becomes intrigued with Starr’s Brando, a mysterious surfing instructor. Production is currently underway.
New animated kids series Ivy Newt adds Michael Sheen (Masters of Sex), Anna Lundberg (Staged), and Matt Lucas (Wonka) to its voice cast. Based on last year’s widely popular adventure series from Irish author Derek Keilty.
FESTIVALS
The Indie Spirit Awards announced the winners:
Best Feature
Best Director
Best Cinematography
Netflix’s Train Dreams
Dir: Clint Bentley
DP: Adolpho Veloso
Curious about the film? Check out our workshop with Clint: https://theindustry.co/p/workshop-with-oscar-nominated-writer-5b8
Best Screenplay
Best Supporting Performance
A24’s Sorry, Baby
Wri: Eva Victor
Co-Star: Naomi Ackie
Best First Feature
Best First Screenplay
Mubi’s Lurker
Dir/Wri: Alex Russell
Full list of winners here.
Berlinale Series Market launches Prison Break. The director behind one of the great foreign films of this century, Fernando Meirelles (dir: City of God), is teaming back up with his DP Cesar Charlone (DP: City of God) for a limited series El Abuso.
Here’s the synopsis:
The dramatic 1971 jailbreak of 101 political prisoners from the Tupamaros, a legendary urban guerilla group. Among the escapees was Pepe Mújica, who later became President of Uruguay.
Post City of God, Meirelles has directed The Two Popes. I accidentally ended up walking into his master class at TIFF (woe is me, right?), and he talked about how even though the budget for Two Popes was $40M, he wanted to shoot it like it was made for $5M. Meaning that despite them having these lavish locations, he was very happy to keep the majority of his film in tight close-ups.
He is a deliberate filmmaker, and it’ll be interesting to see if he applies his kinetic approach to filmmaking for this project a la City of God, or goes to the more stoic and deliberate.
Enzo Vogrincic (Society of the Snow) will star.
Berlin’s Breakout film is currently:
Rose
Cast: Sandra Hüller
Synopsis:
In the early 17th century, a soldier arrives at an isolated Protestant village in Germany claiming to be the heir to an abandoned farmstead. Even though he proves to be a good man, the villagers’ suspicions about his identity grow and they force a reckoning.
Mini Tidbits:
Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond) has a new prod co, FMG. Their first project is Calabash, which played in the AfroBerlin section.
Three projects launching at EFM, including one with Jeremy Irons.
TECH SECTION
Pulp Fiction writer, Roger Avary, switches to AI filmmaking.
Avary, who said he’d been struggling to get films made for years, recently launched General Cinema Dynamics, an AI film company, and suddenly, funding flooded in.
He now has three AI films in active production:
Christmas movie
Release: late 2026
Faith-based film
Release: Easter 2027
Romance/War Epic
Right now, we still have not seen a fully or even partially AI-made feature film premiere in theaters. Hooray! We’ll have to see whether any distributors are willing to release this trio of films, given recent AI backlash.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
A24 + Lenny Abrahamson. The director and studio behind the astonishingly stark, disturbing yet tender Room (2015) are teaming back up on a new family drama.
This one is set in the 1970s in Dublin’s Jewish community.
Synopsis:
Davey, a 12-year-old boy on the edge of change, navigates the anxieties of adolescence alongside the evolving dynamics of his parents’ marriage.
Abrahamson is a master at distorting typical familial relations into something profound. He did it with the tender fantasy Brie Larson creates for Jacob Tremblay trapped in that dungeon in A24’s Room. And again, in his recent Hulu series Normal People (2020), with a couple who keep an illicit affair going well past its prime.
We hope to see what he brings to this new project, which is in partnership with Film4.
Filming March 2.
Spike Lee’s assistant on Da 5 Bloods, Kerry Mondragon, is directing his third feature, Mascotland. It’s got an interesting cast:
Billy Zane
Armie Hammer
Tyrese Gibson (Fast & Furious)
Jake Busey (Stranger Things)
Official Synopsis:
The desert-set 1990s period piece follows two brothers who, with the help of some costumes, have escaped a lifetime of captivity under Rourke’s character.
This tilts a little more towards Mondragon’s first feature, Tyger Tyger, which was a crime film by way of Into the Wild featuring Dylan Sprouse doing his best (trailer). Mondragon likes visual surrealism, though his second feature was a hallucinogenic indigenous horror film (Trailer).
Mascotland is currently shooting in LA.
The producer behind Sundance Grand Jury Prize US Drama winner Josephine, David Kaplan, is ready to go on his next project, Triumph of the Will. It is a WWII period drama directed by Gabriel Nussbaum (prod. White Girl).
Over the weekend, Josephine was acquired by Sumerian Pictures (dist. The Wolf, the Fox and the Leopard) in a seven-figure deal for U.S. rights + an awards campaign promise. The award-winning film is also playing in Competition at Berlin.
Mini Tidbits:
U.S. financier Wagner Entertainment (Lone Wolf) brings on two new heads. Ryan Hamilton, coming from sales agent Arclight Films (Deep Water), was hired as Head of Worldwide Sales. And Christine Vachon’s assistant at Killer Films, Amanda Larney, will take on the role of Head of Development. Nice work, Amanda!
Dark Sky Films picks up North American rights for the folk horror film Blood Shine. It follows a devout woman and a filmmaker entangled in eerie rituals. Directed by husband and wife Justin Brooks & Emily Bennett, Blood Shine plans to release this year.
Outlander actress Rosie Day is making her directorial debut with One Hundred and Fifty Two Days, a feature adaptation of Giles Paley-Phillips’ bestselling drama novel. The novel is told through the eyes of a child with pneumonia, as his mother is dealing with cancer treatments.
Prolific documentarian Frederick Wiseman has died (Titicut Follies) at 96 years old. His docs looked behind the curtain at social institutions like High School (1968) and City Hall (2020). In his cinema, multitudes of comforting and exacting close-ups, not always glorifying but not always demeaning. Just watch this end scene of Welfare (1975). His last film, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023), took a sharp look at a renowned restaurant and was a testament to his enduring creative eye.
His most renowned, Titicut Follies - Trailer.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
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