Timothée Chalamet Lost
Yesterday’s edition was written huddled in the corner of a tiny LA hotel room while my girlfriend tried to sleep. We were there on a road trip along the California coast for her birthday; I made the mistake of calling Todd Phillips Todd Haynes. Today’s edition was written on a plane flight with what could be generously called intermittent Wifi from LA to NY. All the names are correct. On to today’s email…
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan, Michael Bay’s toilet, Vince Vaughn’s untrue detective, and Paul Feig goes horror.
Let’s go!
Last chance for today’s virtual live event – The Ross Brothers’ (Dir: Gasoline Rainbow - Venice Film Festival 2023) will showcase how they secured a financing and distribution deal with Mubi. Participants will see the pitch material and strategy the directors used to win the deal.
Register for the live virtual event here:
https://theindustry.co/p/ross-brothers-live-event-how-to-win
P.S. If you’re a yearly subscriber, there’s a 50% discount. If you’re a founding member, the event is free.
Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown, which just dropped a first-look trailer.
The role is undoubtedly a challenge. The last time a Dylan biopic was committed to screen, six actors took on the role (Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw).
After prepping for three years to play Bob Dylan, Chalamet discussed the challenge of playing the prolific genre-defining songwriter:
"As an actor, you sort of live at a dining room table in your head, and you have about 30 personalities at the table, and you're trying to attend to them, without going crazy."
Plan B producer Dede Gardner put it:
"His ability is just prismatic—in a way that it would, by definition, take him years for all the sides to show."
Read more on Chalamet's biggest unknown:
https://theindustry.co/p/complete-unknown
A Complete Unknown arrives in theaters in December of this year.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Michael Bay’s Toilet - From Brainrot to the big screen:
A few weeks ago, we reported that after his feature Ambulance took a nose dive, Michael Bay would be transitioning to TV; we have now found that venture has landed him in the eye of a storm of moral panic, confusion and the bizarre world of Gen Alpha's internet addiction.
I need you to listen to me for a second, what I am about to tell you is possibly the most confusing thing to ever happen in the film industry.
Skibidi Toilet is a TikTok series of shorts that went viral. The shorts begin with a seemingly innocuous animated head popping out of a toilet singing a Bulgarian pop song. Then in comes the Camera Men (Men with Cameras for heads) and the… Skibidi Toilet army and their attempt at world domination (photo).
Yeah, it’s weird.
Garnering 20 Billion views on TikTok and 65 billion views on YouTube, for whatever reason, this has become the media that has captivated the newest, most vulnerable generation and has already become a phenomenon with toys and spin-offs and has potentially medically induced psychosis in gen-alpha.
Now these roughly 70x 1 to 5-minute shorts will be turned into a full franchise with Bay and Adam Goodman (Producer: Dune) at the helm. While Skibidi has not yet landed at a studio and is very much in development, with the insane numbers, it is almost inevitable that soon we will hear the baleful call of the toilet men rolling through our collective American consciousness.
Watch the shorts and try to understand: