‘Blazing Saddles’ screenwriter Norman Steinberg dead at 83

Michael Lerner — an actor who is known for his roles in Barton Fink, Elf, Godzilla and more — has died at 81 years old, his family announced Sunday.

J. Kim Murphy Before “Air” could get the greenlight, director Ben Affleck needed one last seal of approval. With months of development already complete, the director flew out to meet with Michael Jordan, seeking his blessing for the film, which explores the NBA star’s landmark 1984 sponsorship deal with Nike and the origin of the Air Jordan line. For screenwriter Alex Convery, this was the most stressful 24 hours of his career. “Either this was going to get made and it would be my first produced movie, or it’s all going to fall apart. Back to square one,” Convery recalls in a conversation with Variety. “To really do this responsibly, you need Michael to say yes. Ben said it in the first meeting, ‘We will not do the movie if Michael doesn’t want to do it.’”

post-COVID theatrical gambit, “Air,” tells the mostly untold story of how Nike convinced a promising NBA rookie named Michael Jordan to sign with them over the market-dominating likes of Addidas and Converse. Directed by Ben Affleck and starring Matt Damon alongside a packed ensemble cast, the film also stars Viola Davis, Chris Tucker, Jason Bateman, Marlon Wayans and Chris Messina and has debuted to mostly rapturous reviews and early-bird Oscar buzz.It’s also the feature screenwriting debut of 25-year-old Alex Convery.

Norman Reynolds, the two-time Oscar winning production and art designer on various Star Wars and Indiana Jones films who director Steven Spielberg once called the “creative core” of the franchises, has died. He was 89.

confirmed the designer’s death on Twitter along with the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. “Norman was a cherished husband, father, father-in-law, granddad and great grandad,” read a statement obtained by BBC. “He died peacefully with his wife Ann and three daughters by his side.”Reynolds worked as art director on “Star Wars: A New Hope” in 1977, winning an Oscar for it in 1978.

Ben Croll Running concurrent with the wider festival, NewImages’ mercantile section has become an event unto itself, hosting a global who’s who from the XR scene while helping in no small part to reshape the field. As it stands to welcome nearly 250 participants – roughly half divided between market participants and heavyweight decision makers – this year’s fully in-person event should do little to reverse that trend. “We’re very international,” says XR market head Ellen Kuo. “With more than half of our participants coming from outside Europe, and with several coming from the U.K., Italy, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Poland, I call [our network] Paris beyond Paris.”

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Nick Schenk, a film and television screenwriter with an affinity for grit, has signed with Agency for the Performing Arts.  Schenk has penned three scripts that became director-star vehicles for Clint Eastwood: “Gran Torino,” “The Mule,” and “Cry Macho.” 2008’s “Gran Torino” revived Eastwood as a leading man at the box office, earning nearly $270 million worldwide on a reported $33 million budget. Schenk also wrote “The Judge,” a 2014 feature teaming of Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall, earning the latter an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.  Most recently, Schenk co-wrote ‘”A Christmas Story Christmas” for Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment. An update to the holiday classic, the HBO Max original saw young Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) all grown up trying to recreate the Christmas magic of his youth for his own kids. 

Two men have denied causing the death of Oldham teenager Alisha Goup by dangerous driving.

BreAnna Bell Fox has given a straight-to-series order for the medical procedural drama “Doc.” The series is slated to debut on the network in 2023-2024. Hailing from executive producers Barbie Kligman (“Magnum P.I.,” “Secrets and Lies,” “Private Practice”), Hank Steinberg (“For Life,” “Without a Trace”) and Erwin Stoff (“I Am Legend,” “The Matrix”), “Doc” is based on the Italian series “Nelle tue mani,” which was created and is produced by Lux Vide, a division of Fremantle. According to Fox’s official description, “Doc” focuses on Dr. Amy Elias, chief of internal and family medicine at Westside Hospital in Minneapolis. “After a brain injury erases the last eight years of her life, Amy must navigate an unfamiliar world where she has no recollection of patients she’s treated, colleagues she’s crossed, the soulmate she divorced, the man she now loves and the tragedy that caused her to push everyone away. She can rely only on her estranged 17-year-old daughter, whom she remembers as a 9-year-old, and a handful of devoted friends, as she struggles to continue practicing medicine, despite having lost nearly a decade of knowledge and experience,” the description reads.

EXCLUSIVE: Fox has given a straight-to-series order to medical procedural drama Doc, a U.S. adaptation of the popular Italian series Doc — Nelle tue mani, to premiere during the 2023-24 season. The project, which landed at the network in February in competitive situation with a script-to-series commitment, hails from writer, executive producer and showrunner Barbie Kligman (Magnum P.I.), executive producers Hank Steinberg (For Life) and 3 Arts’ Erwin Stoff, Sony Pictures Television, which acquired the international rights to the format in 2020, and Fox Entertainment Studios.

Refresh for latest…: It was a bow-wow-wow! start for Lionsgate/Thunder Road Films/87 Eleven’s John Wick: Chapter 4 with $137.5M global this session. Of that, $64M is estimated from 71 international box office markets. All were No. 1 starts and cumulatively are 73% above John Wick 3 – Parabellum’s 2019 start.

There’s more zombies coming to AMC and this time they’re falling from the sky.

EastEnders star Ellie Dadd dolled herself up for a big 18th birthday bash this month. Recognised amongst soap lovers for portraying Amy Mitchell, the teenager uploaded a gallery of glamorous photos onto Instagram earlier in the week, showing off the breathtaking party grounds while posing in a white ballgown and high heels.

, has died, according to a statement provided by his family. Per the statement, the late screenwriter died March 15 at his Hudson Valley home in upstate New York. He was 83.Born in Brooklyn, New York, and a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh law school, Steinberg turned to comedy writing after life as an attorney did not turn out how he had imagined it would.

Norman Steinberg, who co-scripted Mel Brooks’ comedy classic Blazing Saddles with and won an Emmy for Flip Wilson’s 1970s variety show, has died. He was 83. The WGA East said Steinberg died March 15 but did not provide other details.

scholarship fund was created at the university under his name.

Netflix has tapped Academy Award nominee Jon Spaihts (Dune: Part One & Two) to pen its live-action Gears of War film, based on the hit video game series, Deadline can confirm.

Christopher Vourlias Four African episodic screenwriters will take the stage Tuesday at Series Mania to pitch the genre-flavored series they currently have in development, a crop of shows that reflect the rich and fertile landscape for African series creators looking to tap into the global TV market.  The shows are created by the first graduating class of the AuthenticA Series Lab, a training program for African episodic screenwriters launched last year by Realness Institutein partnership with Geneva-based philanthropic organization The StoryBoard Collective and Series Mania. The four participants have spent the past six months in a collaborative environment that included both online workshops and residencies in South Africa and Switzerland, while attending masterclasses with leading industry professionals and working with a mentoring team comprised of creative producer Mehret Mandefro and story expert Selina Ukwuoma.

Charna Flam Ann Green de Toth, a screenwriter and widow to director André de Toth, died March 3 in Toluca Lake, Calif. after a third battle with cancer. She was 82. De Toth joined the film industry in 1969, after working on “Heart of Darkness” with producer Jeffrey Selznick and director Andrezej Wajd. In the following years, de Toth would collaborate with her husband on many of his films, including “El Condor,” “The Todd Killings,” “Click of The Hammer,” “Prelude and Fugue for Lovers,” “The Silent Nine,” “The Professor” and “The Fighting Temeraire.” Born on June 16, 1940, in London, de Toth initially pursued secretarial training early in her career. She attended the Berlitz Schools of Language, where she organized special courses and recruited English teachers. During her five years at the institution, de Toth met her late husband.

Oscar-winning screenwriter, playwright and film director Christopher Hampton was on feisty form in a masterclass in Qatar earlier this week as part of the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra talent incubator event (March 10-16).