Like it or not, city-folk, “Yellowstone” has officially gone mainstream. That’s right, after years of being relegated to underground middle American word-of-mouth, Taylor Sheridan’s modern western Paramount series is finally getting its due.
25.05.2022 - 19:25 / deadline.com
The emergence of Isabel May as the lead in Taylor Sheridan’s frontier epic series 1883 is such an unlikely discovery story that it still has the actress trying to come to grips with a star-making turn that should factor in the Emmy race.
It was in a casting meeting with May for another project that Sheridan discovered she was exactly the actress he needed for the origin story of Yellowstone’s Dutton clan. He was under great pressure to find the handle for the origin story that consists of a harrowing wagon train caravan from Texas to Montana. Something was missing, though. That was, until he met May for the female lead opposite Jeremy Renner in another of his Paramount+ series, Mayor of Kingstown.
Both he and May felt she wasn’t right for that role (Emma Laird played the troubled Iris), but during that meeting Sheridan found the handle for his period epic, a fresh face that could convey innocence that is slowly replaced by a young woman’s love for the rough frontier not seen since Madeleine Stowe’s turn as Cora in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. Sheridan put all his chips on the table, getting Paramount to sign the actress on faith, to pull her out of other pilot season opportunities, and getting May. And get May and her reps to trust him that she would want to keep herself available for the role of Elsa Dutton. This was before Sheridan decided to not only make her the catalyst of the limited series, but also its narrator.
“I saw she could represent innocence and hope,” Sheridan says. “At that point I had not figured out how to tell this story and I had Sam Elliott over here, and I had Tim McGraw there, and Faith Hill, and I had not found the bridge between them all. When I met Isabel, the whole story, all 10
Like it or not, city-folk, “Yellowstone” has officially gone mainstream. That’s right, after years of being relegated to underground middle American word-of-mouth, Taylor Sheridan’s modern western Paramount series is finally getting its due.
After having a difficult experience with acting, Taylor Sheridan decided he needed a change. He began writing screenplays in 2013 and his hard work soon paid off as Yellowstone became Paramount Network’s first scripted series and flagship show, spawning spinoffs and now awards recognition.
Inspiration can come from the most unanticipated places, like walking the dog in the park or buying a soft pretzel at the mall. For Morgan Cooper, it came in 2019 while driving down Route 71 in Kansas City, Missouri. Heading home after shooting a low-budget beauty commercial, Cooper concocted a plan to turn ’90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air into a gritty short film, with Will Smith’s iconic character reimagined as an unlucky Philly teen who gets caught with a gun during a playground brawl. Rather than face a certain future behind bars, his Uncle Phil works some attorney magic and arranges for Will to start over in the wealthy Southern California neighborhood where he would attend an elite private school.
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Long before he became a premier storyteller for Paramount+, Taylor Sheridan was a journeyman actor who struggled to support his family. The older he got, the more he found himself descending on the call sheet. What should have been a welcome burst of momentum — playing Deputy Chief David Hale on Sons of Anarchy — turned out to be the final dose of humiliation that led him to change horses. An ask for a decent raise was the thing that compelled Sheridan to begin writing scripts. Sheridan was several seasons into playing what he believed to be a pivotal role in the SAMCRO universe, but the studio suits didn’t seem to share his assessment.
The rise of streamer content has created anxiety for talent and their reps, because of models that require ownership of a project in perpetuity. Because product starts on a streaming site and then never leaves, there is no chance of backend windfalls. Just look at the creators and cast of Squid Game to see what that can mean: a billion-dollar property for Netflix, embarrassingly tiny paydays for the artists who made it, and little hope of making up the shortfall in subsequent seasons.
It has been nearly two years since a group of the best and brightest young agents and partners told their bosses they were stepping away from their million-dollar salaries to follow former eOne strategy officer and CAA television veteran Peter Micelli and be the founding partners of a new management company, Range Media Partners.
With the motion picture business shifting almost exclusively to franchises over the past decades, screenwriters are increasingly put through the wringer as they find themselves replaced and replaced again throughout protracted development processes. It’s a punishing road that can be demoralizing for writers who have often spent months pitching for an open writing assignment. But as more and more streamers look to add content to their film slates, screenwriters are finding new opportunities to flip the script.
If Abigail Disney had listened to her financial advisers growing up, the heiress would have concentrated on one thing above all else: getting even richer.
In 2021, the Cannes film festival programmed movies from an unprecedented number of women and people of color, more than in any other year. Director Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or for her film Titane, becoming only the second woman to do so. This win gave people hope that maybe change was coming from the white, male-dominated festival.
Lukas Dhont’s Cannes debut was also his debut feature, Girl, which ran in Un Certain Regard in 2018. A stunning start for the young Belgian, the movie brought him the Caméra d’Or and myriad other prizes down the line. Now, four years later, Dhont is returning to Cannes with his follow-up, Close, which has landed him in the main competition.
Another one! After Yellowstone‘s 1883 had a successful run on Paramount+, the network confirmed that the series would be coming back — but in a different way.
When Marina Ovsyannikova stormed the live broadcast of Russia’s flagship news program on March 14 to protest Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it was a valiant moment that quickly reverberated across the world. The journalist and editor spent six seconds holding a sign saying, “No war, they are lying to you,” on the Kremlin-controlled TV Channel One where she worked.
Film producers are often used to facing challenging situations but for Denis Ivanov, he never could have anticipated the dramatic diversion his job would take when, on February 24th, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of his home country.
Robin Thede of A Black Lady Sketch Show and Bridget Everett of Somebody Somewhere have taken over for Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the comedy queens of HBO. Here, Deadline checked in with multi-hyphenates about their start in Hollywood and how they made their visions a reality.
Twenty-four hours before his win for Best Documentary Feature would result in one of the most powerful speeches of this year’s Oscar night, Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson and his Summer of Soul team gathered at an intimate brunch in the picturesque gardens of Dana Walden’s Brentwood estate. Walden was there, along with Peter Rice, Matthew Greenfield, David Greenbaum and other high-level Disney executives. Even Disney CEO Bob Chapek put in an appearance.
Audrey Diwan’s planned English language directing debut, the erotic tale Emmanuelle starring Lea Seydoux, has buyers buzzing as much as any Cannes Market package being shopped this week on the Croisette. But her last film Happening (which didn’t make the cut as France’s choice for Best Foreign Language Film, though many felt it would have won) might have the most lasting impact. The film is just released in the U.S. smack in the middle of revelations that the Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe V Wade.