‘Butcher’s Crossing’ Producer on Casting Nicolas Cage and Working with the Blackfeet Nation to Tell the Story of Buffalo Decimation in America

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor SPOILER ALERT: This contains spoilers from the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” Season 16. Charlize Theron expressed her strong support for the drag community in her debut as a guest judge on the season premiere of MTV’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” In the opening episode of Season 16, the Oscar-winning actor and longtime LGBTQ told the queens that the groundswell of efforts to curb the rights of drag performers is driven by fear and ignorance. “Given the climate in our country right now, there’s a lot of energy being put toward your community not existing. I truly believe that all of that is coming from a place of fear,” Theron told the contenders on the long-running competition series.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in Feb. 2022, Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov grabbed his camera and filmed as the city of Mariupol came under heavy artillery bombarding. The reporter intended not to make a film but to capture everything he witnessed.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” led the 11th annual Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild Award nominations. The final installment of the “Guardians” franchise used over 22,500 prosthetics, 500 wigs and 130 facial hairpieces, breaking the world record for most prosthetics used in a film.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Director Blitz Bazawule had a clear vision of what he wanted Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) to represent in “The Color Purple.” She was a bold, sexy, beautiful and extraordinary woman, but she was also loving and nurturing to Celie (Fantasia Barrino) and Sophia (Danielle Brooks). “Those were her sisters and there was a bond there,” Tym Wallace, the film’s makeup and hair department artist explains.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Choreographer Fatima Robinson fused hip-hop, dance, African history, tap, jazz and even Jamaican moves as she crafted the musical numbers in “The Color Purple,” but there was one person in particular whose energy she wanted to capture: Beyoncé. Specifically, the energy of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.” Director Blitz Bazawule blends Alice Walker’s text and the Broadway musical to reimagine the classic as a vibrant movie musical. “American Idol’s” Fantasia Barrino plays Celie, a woman who slowly finds her voice with Shug Avery’s (Taraji P.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor In Paul King’s “Wonka,” there is a scene where Noodle (Calah Lane) and Willy Wonka (Timothee Chalamet) have to sneak into a zoo so he can produce his one-of-a-kind chocolate. There the duo meets Abigail the giraffe and milks her. It cues up the musical number “For a Moment” where they fly over way the town’s Galeria and back into the town square.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the shortlists in 10 categories for the upcoming 96th Oscars ceremony. Overall, Greta Gerwig’s meta-comedy “Barbie” had the most mentions with five including sound, original song for its three submissions from Billie Eilish (“What I Was Made For?”), Dua Lipa (“Dance the Night”) and Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt (“I’m Just Ken”), and original score, from the latter duo. The big miss for “Barbie” was in makeup and hairstyling, which was the category that yielded the most surprises.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor VFX supervisor Sean Konrad was tasked with bringing to life some iconic titans back for Apple TV+’s eight-part series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.” Among them are “Kong: Skull Island’s” Mother Longlegs and Godzilla, as well as some new monsters, including a crab-inspired titan and star-mole beast. Showrunner and writer Chris Black had always wanted to open the series on Skull Island to root the viewer in familiarity without having to rewatch past films. The opening episode sees Bill Randa (John Goodman) being chased through a bamboo forest that opens out onto a rock peninsula, before Mother Longlegs emerges.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor When Greta Gerwig worked with costume designer Jacqueline Durran on “Little Women,” the pair went on a trip to a building in London’s Docklands to draw inspiration for the adaptation. “There were old file cabinets labeled ‘British Gardens 1830-1835′ and things you couldn’t find anywhere,” Gerwig recalls. “There were out-of-print books and original frames for making corsets and hoop skirts.” A few years later, the director would turn to Durran to help bring the aesthetic of “Barbie” to life.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Alexander Payne calls editor Kevin Tent his filmmaking partner. The two first met running in the same L.A. film school circles.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” has won rave reviews and is tipped to be an Oscars favorite with its satirical portrayal of the exploitation of Black people in media, balanced with sharp comedy and a punch of emotional family drama. Jefferson credits his editor, Hilda Rasula, with striking the right tone for the film. “The thing I appreciate about Hilda is that she never lies, she’s very honest, and she tells me when she doesn’t like something,” Jefferson tells Variety.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Based on the nonfiction book by David Grann, “Killers of the Flower Moon” stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, a WWI vet who travels to Oklahoma to work for his wealthy uncle, William King Hale, played by Robert De Niro. It’s the early 1920s, and this part of Oklahoma sits on lots of oil, whose rights are owned by the Native American Osage and other tribes. They are prosperous, some even rich, and it’s here that Ernest meets Mollie (Lily Gladstone).

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor “The Color Purple” director Blitz Bazawule hesitated to take on the latest incarnation of Alice Walker’s sacred text. However, when he revisited the book, the first line (“Dear God, I’m 14 years old”) struck him as a way to navigate a familiar story and “keep expanding Celie’s imagination.” In the new musical movie adaptation, as Celie (Fantasia Barrino) is bathing Shug (Taraji P. Henson), an old record plays on a gramophone in the background.

Five tones. That’s all it took for John Williams to convey a sense of a wider form of communication that stretches from the Earth to the Cosmos. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a film about (among many things) communication and the power of the universal language of music in particular. It is fitting, then, that the Royal Albert Hall would make room for Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Sci-Fi classic in its season of live orchestral performances this year. Not only is it a wonderful chance to revisit one of Spielberg’s finest, but it offers a means to greater appreciate just how emotionally complex William’s work is in this tale of making connection with beings not of this world. Seeing a film with a live orchestra is an experience that everyone should embark upon, be it your first time seeing the film for your 100th. It is a uniquely immersive experience, bringing you into the film in a way that no other screening format can quite muster. Music, and particularly the music of John Williams, is often used to heighten emotion and elevate scenes to their peak resonance, and the tangibility of seeing an orchestra play the score as the film progresses brings you even closer to those emotions in a truly profound fashion.The film and the score all build-up to one of the finest finales put to screen with the eventual meeting between our characters and the aliens who have been telegraphing their arrival. The moments of witty government conspiracy and deeply touching and devastating family drama give way to the meeting of human and alien, as the human race communicates to the huge, foreboding and colourful mothership through the medium of music. It is a sequence that never loses its grandeur on repeat viewing, a moment in which the

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Is “May December” camp or not? That’s the question the internet is currently obsessing over, but whether you fall on the “definitely” or “no, rude question!” side, one clue can be found in the dark comedy’s notably prominent score by Marcelo Zavros. Ten minutes into the Todd Haynes movie that’s loosely based on the story of Mary Kay Letournau, Julianne Moore, playing Gracie, the wife and mother, opens the fridge while getting ready for a family barbecue. As she casually comments, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs,” the lush chords familiar from the 1971 movie “The Go-Between” burst loudly into the scene, lending the mundane moment an unexpected melodramatic punch.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor The biggest challenge for “Poor Things” costume designer Holly Waddington was trying to establish a costume arc for Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter. In the Searchlight film based on Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Bella is a creation of Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist Godwin. He brings Bella back to life after she tries to kill herself, using the brain of an unborn fetus, and Bella ends up a young child trapped in a woman’s body.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Five years ago, while chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios Jennifer Lee was finishing work on “Frozen II,” she mentioned to her co-director, Chris Buck, that the studio’s 100th anniversary was coming up — and asked whether he’d want to be involved in any projects pegged to the anniversary?They didn’t have any idea what that animated feature would be but they knew that “we wanted original characters, story and music,” says Buck. They began gathering stills from every animated feature the studio had done and pinned them to a bulletin board. They looked at the breadth of colors and styles. From “Pinocchio’s” Jiminy Cricket to “The Princess and the Frog’s” Tiana to Judy Hopps in “Zootopia,” one thing was apparent — that these and many other characters had all made wishes on stars. “It feels very obvious.

Variety FYC Fest on Dec. 6 in Los Angeles. Variety‘s senior awards editor Clayton Davis, Senior Artisans Editor Jazz Tangcay and Senior Entertainment & Media Writer Matt Donnelly moderated several panels throughout the event.

Variety’s senior artisans editor Jazz Tangcay during Variety’s A Night With Artisans. The creatives who helped build the Los Alamos set for “Oppenheimer” or acquired 1,000 blankets for “Killers of the Flower Moon” shared their creative processes and stories from set. In six separate conversations, Tangcay spoke with the teams behind “Oppenheimer,” “Saltburn,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Maestro,” “American Fiction” and “The Color Purple.” See the full Variety A Night With Artisans recap below.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Brainstorming about how “Trolls: Band Together” should look, the creatives decided they wanted to take the colorful creatures to a different world than the previous two installments of the animated franchise.In this tale, Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) learns that Branch (Justin Timberlake) was once part of her favorite boyband, BroZone. When his brother Floyd (Troye Sivan) is kidnapped by pop star villains voiced by Andrew Rannells and Amy Schumer, Branch and Poppy bring the band back together to rescue him, embarking on a grand adventure culminating in a huge concert that turns into a rollercoaster-esque car chase.