Hollywood’s Big Streaming Pivot Will Be Costly for Indie Films (Guest Column)

There is a void. Where once there was sunlight. There is a void.

Dina LaPolt Guest ColumnistIn a judicial opinion filed last month, The State of Maryland’s highest court ruled that rap lyrics may be admitted in court as evidence of a defendant’s guilt. This blatantly racist decision is a travesty that sets a dangerous precedent.The case involves the January 2017 killing of George Forrester, who was shot by a drug dealer after he attempted to buy cocaine with a counterfeit bill.

Actor Demián Bichir has written numerous columns for Deadline on subjects ranging from the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, the cruel forced separation of refugee children by the Trump Administration, the powerful imagery of Roma and the need to protect from Covid those locked up along the border for seeking the American dream.

Long before former Hulu chief Jason Kilar became disruptor in chief at WarnerMedia and put the entire 2021 Warner Bros slate on HBO Max, Fredric Rosen began changing the way concert tickets were sold as the Ticketmaster president/CEO, when the service became the leading computerized ticketing company in the world.

The upcoming movie The United States vs Billie Holiday, which stars Andra Day as the title character, has been sold to Hulu!

Editors note: Rachel Feldman is a Los Angeles-based film and television director whose credits include over 75 hours of longform movies and recent series including ABC’s The Rookie, CBS’ Blue Bloods and Criminal Minds, and MGM’s The Baxters. A former chair of the DGA Women’s Steering Committee, she is working on a political thriller based on the life of equal-pay icon Lily Ledbetter.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentThe entertainment industry had been under fire for irresponsible depictions of violence from the early days, including 1930s gangster movies and the glut of 1950s TV Westerns.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentThe public often assumes that if celebrities are rich and famous, their lives must be trouble-free. Actually, lots of showbiz horror stories negate that, but they’re usually about addiction and/or self-destruction.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentAs a long-delayed sequel to Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1939 guest column, Variety invited First Lady Michelle Obama to write about showbiz. The item ran on the front page on Oct.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentThe sixth-anniversary issue of Daily Variety, on Oct. 20, 1939, contained something that was unprecedented for the newspaper and for the author: A guest column by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt about movies.She started by saying she was uniquely unqualified to write about the motion picture industry.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentOne of the many upheavals created by World War II was the method of news reporting. In May 1939, for example, Variety carried a story about an exciting system that allowed newsreel footage from Europe to be seen in the U.S.

George Clooney has defended Tom Cruise after the movie star was caught on tape blasting Mission: Impossible crew members for ignoring COVID protocols.The action man reportedly lost his cool when he spotted two assistants huddled around a monitor, watching playback, and he fired off an angry rant threatening to fire anyone who didn’t take the health and safety rules he helped put in place seriously.He raged, “We are the gold standard.

Editors Note: As chairman/CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment in the era of Titanic, X-Men, Independence Day and Braveheart, and producer of the Oscars and Oscar-nominated films like Hacksaw Ridge and Coraline, Bill Mechanic has been part of the fabric of the film industry his whole career. He thought he had seen every iteration and change in a business striving to stay relevant in the digital age.

At one point, the 71st Berlin Film Festival was planning on being held as planned. An in person festival, held in February, was always a long shot, but hope sprung eternal.

George Clooney revealed his young son Alexander, 3, has asthma, and because of this, his family has barely left their Hollywood Hills compound since the COVID-19 pandemic started.

Peter Csathy COVID-19 forever changed many aspects of our lives this past year, and our collective media and entertainment choices certainly were no exception.The global pandemic fueled a massive industry divide where in-home entertainment choices thrived, while many out-of-home entertainment players, quite literally, died. Whereas Netflix living-room streaming reached new heights, many live music venues and movie theaters shuttered.

Lauren Appelbaum As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to alter people’s holiday celebrations, many people are finding that watching holiday films is one tradition that can continue.

When it was announced that acclaimed filmmaker Wong Kar-wai was going back to restore all of his films in 4K, people were ecstatic. This is a director that has released some of the very best films of the past several decades, including what some consider a couple of the best films of all time.