‘Fawlty Towers’ Stage Play Won’t Have Racial Slurs, John Cleese Says: ‘The Literal-Minded Don’t Understand Irony’

EXCLUSIVE: Dubai-based management and production company 75East has signed Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel, whose narrative feature debut To A Land Unknown is playing in Directors’ Fortnight this year.

Four Manchester United players would appear to have a decent chance of inclusion in Gareth Southgate's England squad for the upcoming European Championship.

Naman Ramachandran London’s Raindance Film Festival is making a significant calendar shift for its 32nd edition, moving from its traditional fall slot to a new summer schedule. Raindance kicks off with the U.K. premiere of Tilman Singer’s “Cuckoo,” a horror feature starring Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens that previously played at Berlin and SXSW.

Refresh for latest…:  After starting early offshore release on John Krasinski’s IF last weekend, Paramount expanded the imaginary friends film to another 56 international box office markets this session. The overseas frame was worth $20M, bringing the international running cume to $24M. With domestic’s $35M debut, the worldwide total is now $59M.

Kate Winslet‘s Lee finally has a debut teaser trailer.

Brand new bombshells could be revealed about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in an upcoming documentary – and the couple are reportedly worried about what will be unveiled. It appears that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are set to be the subjects of a German documentary that promises to uncover "fresh secrets".

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Chile’s Quijote Films, behind Cannes 2023 Un Certain Regard Fipresci Prize winner “The Settlers,” has tied down a powerful alliance of international partners on “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” the first feature of 2018 Cannes Cinéfondation top winner Diego Céspedes. An LGBTQ-themed drama, “The Mysterious Gaze” is set in a mining town where a strange illness is said to be transmitted between men who fall in love with each other.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Harry Shearer has voiced dozens of characters on Fox’s “The Simpsons,” from Mr. Burns to Ned Flanders and Principal Skinner, but he was replaced as the voice of Springfield physician Dr. Hibbert when producers of the show vowed in 2020 to no longer have white actors voice characters of color.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Zurich and Berlin-based distrib DCM has nabbed Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice” ahead of its May 20 world premiere in Cannes, where its screening in competition. Written by Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” follows Donald Trump’s real estate career in New York during the 1970s and ’80s and his relationships with lawyer Roy Cohen (Jeremy Strong), wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and father Fred Trump (Martin Donovan).

Naman Ramachandran Animation studio Toonz Media Group has unveiled an eclectic slate for the Cannes Film Market. Drawing stories from popular Indian ancient fables and retelling them with a contemporary flavor, “Return of the Jungle” is set in present-day India and revolves around a group of classmates from junior school who must outwit the biggest, meanest bully in the school. A cool and loveable grandpa by their side peps the fourth graders with inspiring stories from the jungle.

Queer Eye star Antoni Porowski has assembled a star-studded lineup of celebrity friends who will accompany him on a global culinary adventure in his upcoming Nat Geo docuseries No Taste Like Home. Awkwafina (A Real Bug’s Life), Henry Golding(The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare), James Marsden (Jury Duty),Florence Pugh (Oppenheimer), Issa Rae(Insecure) and Justin Theroux (The Leftovers) take a journey toward cultural and personal discovery with Porowski as their gastronomic guide in the docuseries produced by Gordon Ramsay’s Studio Global Ramsay. No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski is slated to premiere in spring 2025.

As a #MeToo wave looked to rock the 77th Cannes Film Festival with rumors swirling that filmmakers with films at the event would be tagged, Thierry Frémaux emphasized his event isn’t about polemics, rather the picture that’s on the screen. If there are controversies during Cannes “we try to avoid them” he said today during an afternoon presser.

The highly-anticipated Eurovision final is here at last. Some 25 countries will battle it out to become champion of the world's biggest music competition.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Munich-based sales agency The Playmaker has closed several key distribution deals on heist comedy “Two to One,” starring Sandra Hüller, who was Oscar nominated this year for “Anatomy of a Fall.” The Playmaker has sold the film to KMBO in France, A Contracorriente in Spain, Madman in Australia and Rosebud in Greece. The German distributor is X-Verleih.

The Chromatica Ball special is coming, after all!

Kate Winslet will be honored with the Munich International Film Festival’s CineMerit Award. The Oscar winner’s movie Lee will also have its European premiere at the Festival.

Naman Ramachandran David Oyelowo, Meera Syal, Emma D’Arcy and Tobias Menzies are among the actors leading a trio of fall productions at the U.K.’s National Theatre in London. At the National Theatre’s Olivier Theater, David Oyelowo (“Selma”) will play the title role of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus,” directed by Lyndsey Turner (“Under Milk Wood”). In the play, Coriolanus is Rome’s greatest soldier.

Jeffrey Katzenberg is a man known for choosing his words very carefully most of the time, and tonight the WndrCo boss was pretty candid when it came to Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Fawlty Towers.Confirmation of the new incarnation of the beloved comedy came in February, when Cleese revealed he had written a two-hour play based on three episodes from the series – ‘The Hotel Inspector’, ‘The Germans’ and ‘Communication Problems’.The production will debut at London’s Apollo Theatre on May 15, nearly five decades after the first episode was filmed at the BBC Television Centre in December 1974. Tickets can be found here.And now, Cleese has said that the slurs from the original version of ‘The Germans’, which he co-wrote with Connie Booth, will be taken out of the new adaptation.In one scene of the original, the army veteran Major Gowen uses the N-word when referring to a Caribbean cricketer, and another racial slur to describe an Asian cricketer.At the press conference launching the stage show, Cleese said: “Those scenes where the Major used a couple of words you can’t use now, racial slurs they would come under, we took them out.”“There’s always a problem with comedy that you deal with the literal-minded,” he continued.

Naman Ramachandran “Harry Potter” star Tom Felton is currently filming the series “Gandhi,” where he plays Josiah Oldfield, the future Mahatma’s friend in London. Part of the series, produced by Sameer Nair for India’s Applause Entertainment and directed by Hansal Mehta, follows the young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi when he was in London to study law and missing vegetarian food.