Malina Saval Associate Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesAfter another politically and socially turbulent year, the Writers Guild of America is ready to celebrate the best that its members have to offer, while reflecting on the ever-changing social and entertainment landscape.The WGA’s annual awards event, a joint venture between WGAW and WGAWE, will be held on Sunday, March 20th, and similar to last year, will be handled as a virtual event. With COVID still firmly lingering in the space of the populace, the guild’s priorities have naturally shifted in ways that couldn’t have been anticipated, while still staying true to its collective core values.This year’s WGA film award nominees represent a roster of high-caliber talent.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesThe feature film “Freda” and short film “You Can Always Come Home,” both family dramas, earned top prizes at the 39th edition of Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival. Presented in a hybrid format this year, with both in-theater and virtual presentations, the 2022 Festival ran from March 4-13.Making its U.S.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesThe theme of fathers and sons runs through the films of Venezuela-born writer-director Lorenzo Vigas, whose 2015 debut drama “From Afar,” which focuses on a troubled middle-aged man and young hustler in Caracas, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. In Vigas’ latest film “El Caja” (“The Box”), which screened Thursday at the 39th annual Miami Film Festival, this motif continues to resonate — and on a global scale.“El Caja,” which revolves around a young boy in Mexico City longing for a father figure — a desperate search with deadly consequences — could be the prototype of how a dictator such as Vladimir Putin rises to power, Vigas pointed out.“We are always trapped in our obsessions,” Vigas told fest attendees during a Q&A that followed the screening.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesWhether you’re a bigshot Hollywood helmer or hankering to pretend you’re one, the brand new Director Suite at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills (300 Doheny Dr.) will set you up in high-flying style. The 10th floor luxury accommodations, modeled after the famed hotel’s residences, are awash in shafts of soft California sunlight, with three step-out balconies providing sweeping views of the rolling Hollywood hills and downtown Los Angeles in the distance.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesOn almost any given day, a parade of tweens and teens can be seen filing its way through the doors of Un Deux Trois, a girls’ clothing shop on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. Beckoned by racks of party dresses, pouf skirts and an array of accessories ranging from kitten-heeled pumps to belts encrusted with sparkles, these customers come in search of the perfect outfit, whether it’s for a bat mitzvah, prom or black-tie Hollywood soiree.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesWatching “Licorice Pizza,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s cinematic love letter to 1970s San Fernando Valley, one thought continually played in my head: Alana Haim reminds me of me. I don’t mean that in any solipsistic sense — I possess zero singing talent and my ability to play a musical instrument is confined to a year of violin and flute lessons in fourth grade wherein both instructors urged me (strongly, repeatedly) to focus on the literary arts.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesIn 1997, Jeff Friday, founder and CEO of Jeff Friday Media, was working as the film division president of UniWorld Group, a prominent multicultural advertising agency headquartered in New York and founded by legendary ad world maven Byron E. Lewis.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesThe Paley Center for Media is hosting the latest in a series of panels about combating antisemitism on Oct.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesAfter being shut down last year by the pandemic, Savannah College of Art and Design is returning to an in-person format this year for its annual SCAD Savannah Film Festival, which runs Oct. 23-30.The fest will also have a virtual component.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesThe 16th-century Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus famously proclaimed “Clothes make the man.” This is categorically true of James Bond, Ian Fleming’s swashbuckling secret agent, whose costumes through the years — from the Savile Row suits worn by Sean Connery in “Dr.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesLior Raz is ready to take Hollywood by storm. Over lunch at the Sunset Marquis, the Israeli actor-cum-co-creator of “Fauda,” the high-octane thriller focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is primed for what comes next.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesSean Penn’s golden retrievers scamper around his Malibu home, tails wagging with insouciant abandon, their winged, flaxen fur flapping against their snouts like the long, blond hair of 1970’s supermodels. They are the Bo Derek of dogs.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesSeveral years ago, a non-Jewish film producer turned to me and announced, casually and with an air of arrogance and ignorance reserved particularly for bigots, “Jews control Hollywood.”He assured me this was a compliment, as many antisemites are wont, trotting out Neal Gabler’s seminal text on the subject, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” as evidence.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesOnce the estate of Santa Monica founder Sen. John P.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesAs tensions continue to flare in the Middle East, Creative Community for Peace,  an apolitical, non-profit entertainment industry organization, has come together to issue a collective call for “peace, balanced discourse and an end to inflammatory one-sided accounts” of the conflict between Israel and Palestinian Territories.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesAccording to the U.S. State Dept., about 1.5 million Americans live in Mexico, with more than 88,000 residing in Jalisco, a Mexican state bordering the Pacific Ocean.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesAustralian-born clothing designer Suzie Kondi, who “basically grew up on the floor” of her mother’s fabric store, first started making tracksuits for herself.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesThe Governors Ball has been canceled and the Elton John AIDS Foundation benefit bash has been relegated to an online format.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, Features“The evolution of art is in constant flux,” says Ethan Hawke.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesIn 2001, Gordon Bobb, now a partner at Del Shaw Moonves Tanaka Finkelstein & Lezcano, attended his first Sundance Film Festival. Bobb had joined the prestigious entertainment law firm the previous year and was accompanying one of his early clients, a Black filmmaker whose film was screening at the event.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesIsraeli-American actress-producer-author Noa Tishby was compiling research for what would eventually become her newly released non-fiction book “Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth” (Simon & Schuster) when she discovered that — save for Golda Meir’s 1973 autobiography and English translations of Israeli historian Anita Shapira’s work — there were no books on the history of Israel penned by a woman.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesErnest Hemingway famously once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”What Papa Hemingway meant, of course, is that the craft of writing is emotional, draining and often psychologically taxing, especially when mining stories that bring to the fore crucial social issues such as racism, sexual harassment and civil rights.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, Features“Glocal” is the key word for the Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival as the annual event provides a platform for both local and global projects.  Of the 93 international submissions to the Oscars, the Florida fest has picked seven films “that moved us and that would speak powerfully to our Miami audience,” says festival executive director Jaie Laplante, who leads a selection committee alongside programming co-director, Lauren Cohen.“We’ve always

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesLaraine Newman was 23 years old when she was cherry-picked by Lorne Michaels to join the inaugural cast of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” in 1975, along with Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris and Dan Aykroyd. During her five-year tenure on the iconic show, Newman skyrocketed to fame for playing memorable characters such as Connie Conehead and Sheri the Valley Girl.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesLong ago, about a year ago to be exact, when COVID-19 first reared its ugly head and the United States was not yet the fiery petri dish of percolating viral plague it would soon come to be, friends and I gathered in our Los Angeles area homes, expecting lockdown to last three, four weeks, at most.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesWhen it comes to the estimable career of Glenn Close, there are myriad stunning scenes that come to mind: sobbing in the shower in “The Big Chill,” the bathroom brawl in “Fatal Attraction,” those final wordless moments in “Dangerous Liaisons” in which she smears the makeup off her face and leaks tears as the screen fades to black.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesIn 1970, Ali MacGraw, then a relatively unknown model-turned-actress fresh off her debut role in “Goodbye, Columbus,” sat on the front steps of a Cambridge, Mass., duplex in deep winter, sobbing and shivering and blubbering the line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”It was the non-apology heard ’round the world.While MacGraw, around 30 years old at the time, didn’t exactly agree with its sentiment, or even her delivery — “I had no acting

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesIn a bright, white auditorium on the rolling campus of a rehab center on the East Coast, I learned that addiction is a disease. The giant room was filled with addicts and alcoholics, including my then-husband, who’d checked in for a monthlong stay to get sober after decades of drinking and drugging.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesOver 170 Black and Jewish leaders from all over the entertainment industry have banded together to launch the Black-Jewish Entertainment Alliance (BJEA), a joint initiative devoted to countering racism and antisemitism, and release a unity statement.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesWhen Bryan Fogel set out to make “The Dissident,” his intrepid and arresting exposé on the assassination of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, he knew there were myriad security risks involved.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesIf 2020 was the year of COVID-19 and the deaths of more than 300,000 Americans at the hands of a ravaging virus and a negligent White House, it was also the year the entertainment industry went virtual. Film festivals, once the domain of buzzy celebrities, caffeinated movie critics and charcuterie boards, were now relegated to online interviews and panel discussions.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesIn Boston we call it a “cucum-BAH.” This was my gut-check response to the Hilaria Baldwin drama that unfolded this past week, an event comprising themes ranging from cultural appropriation to canned phony accents and lingual disparities—“How do you say in English…cucumber?”—to blatant, old-fashioned mendacity. Pandemic lockdown ennui aside, it might seem pointless to unpack this social media soap opera any more than we collectively already have.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesIn Jan.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesRunning from Dec. 11 through Dec.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesRomanticized of late by disgruntled Americans enraged with President Trump and threatening immigration to its friendly northern neighbor, Canada has always held a significant spot in the zeitgeist of popular culture (Celine Dion! Justin Beiber! Ryan Gosling!).

Malina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesThere’s a pivotal scene in Phyllida Lloyd’s keenly observed domestic abuse drama “Herself” in which Sandra, a battered single mother of two little girls, is pitted opposite a judge in a Dublin courtroom. Sandra — played by Irish actor Clare Dunne, who also co-wrote the film — has only recently managed to escape Gary, her abusive husband, within inches of her life.