Tag: hollywood

Journalists who get screen time are most often men—even when the original story was told by a woman.

The untold story of two musicians who contributed to Guns N’ Roses’ early success.

The women of Hollywood are seizing this moment.

No other film conveys the madness or the fun of deadline journalism.

“How do I tell my kids that their dad just died? What are the words?”

From Patty Jenkins to Jordan Peele, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s omissions are telling.

When it came to gathering refugees, the waiting room of the U.S. consulate was probably the closest thing to Rick’s Café Américain.

We are finally taking sexual harassment and abuse seriously. Now what?

Monica Drake recalls a brush with fame, when a famous actress took an interest in making a movie from her novel.

The zombie movie is more than an easy scare. It’s also become an essential lens through which we can view society.

The 1979 summer camp comedy was Bill Murray’s breakout film. It also almost didn’t happen.

He works out twice a day, he remembers everyone he meets, he hopes you’re sleeping soundly and doing great!

Robert Kolker walks us through the $400 billion lawsuit brought by the creators of This Is Spinal Tap against the movie studios, but Spinal Tap fans will love the insider tidbits about the creation of the film.

How the White House advisor turned his talent for mediocre dealmaking into a passion to “weaponize film.”

“We have to get rid of the romantic part.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Fleishman profiles two young Angelenos trying not to break down as they try to break into show business.

Daniel Miller goes behind the scenes to report on the famed red carpet that graces the entrance to the Oscars. What you learn about the care, installation, and true color of this 50,000 square foot rug may just surprise you.

McMahon hired her in 1997, and Chyna became the first woman to battle male wrestlers in the WWF ring, much to the chagrin of many fans, who protested Chyna’s presence by throwing batteries at her and spreading nasty rumors. (One was that she had the world’s largest clit; another, that she had a penis.) But […]

Can Hollywood get pregnant women right?

David Ferry, writing in Outside about the extravagant faux-Egyptian set built for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 film “The Ten Commandments.”

Jamie Tarabay explored Hollywood’s relationship with the Pentagon in a recent piece for Al Jazeera America. The Pentagon has a devoted “entertainment-liaison officer” who acts as a Hollywood point person and helps decide which projects get Pentagon support (in the form of expertise, equipment, and locations). According to scholar Lawrence Suid, the Hollywood military relationship relationship dates back to […]

In 1987, a young Nikki Finke profiled the “Literary Brat Pack” (choice Brat Pack members included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, of Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City fame, respectively) for The Los Angeles Times.

During a Skype conversation, Quadflieg explained that MRI-based brain studies show stereotypes are activated in about 170 milliseconds. No matter how open-minded we fancy ourselves, these biases kick in without our realizing it, she says. In a 2011 study in the journal Neuro­image, Quadflieg reported that the areas of the brain associated with body recognition had […]

Although they had no way of knowing it, the Hartwigs had bought a remnant of the Cora C. Hollister House, a Craftsman-style bungalow built in 1904 by Charles and Henry Greene, two of Southern California’s most admired and transformational residential architects. “In their 20 years of practice,” wrote the late Greene & Greene historian Randell […]

After my internship, my first assignment for National Geographic was a story about the Zinacenteco Indians in the highlands of Chiapas. The subject was interesting but very challenging. As a woman, my access was mostly limited to other women who only spoke the Maya language I was struggling to learn. Once I traversed the language barrier, it […]

The showbiz press has been abuzz all day with news of a surprise shake-up (a group of high-powered talent agents defected en masse from one top agency to another). Most of the coverage has been inside baseball, but an analysis in The Hollywood Reporter by Matthew Belloni provides some interesting insight into Hollywood history: Consider the case of the late legendary agent, who […]

Alex Gibney’s much-talked about new documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief—based on Lawrence Wright’s similarly titled 2013 exposé—has been making headlines since it made its Sundance debut in January. It opened on limited screens across the country last Friday and will premiere on HBO in two weeks. In the meantime, the Church of […]

“I have consciously tried to refocus my attention away from being a film critic and toward being a film historian.”

It doesn’t really seem to make much difference how the voting is done. The quality of the work is still only recognized in the context of success. A superb job in a flop picture would get you nothing, a routine job in a winner will be voted in. It is against this background of success-worship that the voting is done, with the incidental music supplied by a stream of advertising in the trade papers (which even intelligent people read in Hollywood) designed to put all other pictures than those advertised out of your head at balloting time.

The industry term for or a blockbuster movie franchise is a “tentpole”—it’s the asset that holds the whole operation up. At the height of mass culture, in the second half of the 20th century, it was enough to be on television to command an audience in the tens of millions. But as channels multiplied, the difference between […]