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Addie Morfoot Contributor With the success of long-format cult-exposé documentaries such as Hulu’s “Stolen Youth,” HBO’s “The Vow” and Netflix’s “Wild Wild Country,” it’s not surprising that both Amazon and Netflix greenlit competing docuseries about Twin Flames Universe – an alleged online love cult run by YouTube influencers Jeff and Shaleia Divine.Amazon’s “Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe” is being released on Oct. 6, a month before Netflix’s “Escaping Twin Flames.”“Desperately Seeking Soulmate” is based on journalist Alice Hines’ 2020 Vanity Fair article about the “always online, all-consuming world of Twin Flames Universe.” The article and subsequent docuseries, which Hines leads, takes a deep dive into the alleged online love cult, which is still active.

Tatiana Siegel Documentarian Marina Zenovich is adept at exploring the lives of complicated men. From Lance Armstrong to Roman Polanski to Robin Williams, the two-time Emmy winner has tackled subjects who have summited the heights of their professions and endured the humiliating depths as well. Her latest protagonist, former California Gov.

McKinley Franklin editor Amazon Prime Video has set an Oct. 6 premiere date for its upcoming three-episode docuseries “Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe,” which will spotlight the alleged online love cult run by YouTube influencers Jeff and Shaleia Divine.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Stacey Offman, Jigsaw Production’s exec VP of development and production, is exiting the company to work as an independent producer, Variety has confirmed. Longtime Jigsaw producer Erin Edeiken to serve as head of production for Alex Gibney’s shingle going forward. Offman, who is exiting on May 19, joined Jigsaw Productions in 2012. In her 11-year tenure at the documentary production company, Offman was part of the team that launched Jigsaw’s television branch as well as the creation of a vertical of non-fiction series and documentaries for an array of studios and broadcast partners. Offman’s recent projects include Jigsaw’s “Dirty Money,” a six-part investigative series which exposed corruption and financial malfeasance in some of the most influential companies and industries. The series began streaming on Netflix in January 2018. In addition, Offman developed “Salt, Fat, Acid Heat,” a 2018 four-part Netflix culinary travel series based on Samin Nosrat’s book by the same name, which won a James Beard Media Award. Offman also spearheaded notable political projects including Showtime’s Emmy winning “Kingdom of Silence” (2019) and Apple TV’s Emmy nominated series “The Line” (2021).

Sarah Paulson is set to play Gwen Shamblin, the founder of a diet program Weigh Down Workshop and Remnant Fellowship, in a scripted version of the investigative docuseries, The Way Down.

Sarah Paulson is set to star and exec produce the HBO Max scripted adaptation of its docuseries The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin.

Kate Aurthur editor Sarah Paulson is no stranger to playing real people: Among other roles, she won an Emmy award for her portrayal of Marcia Clark in 2016’s “The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” and was recently nominated for an Emmy for “Impeachment: American Crime Story” for playing Linda Tripp. Now, Paulson is attached to star and executive produce the scripted adaptation of “The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin,”  which HBO Max is developing from its own five-part docuseries. Michelle Dean, who was the co-creator of the 2019 Hulu limited series “The Act,” is the showrunner of the scripted adaptation. HBO Max dropped the first three episodes of Marina Zenovich’s investigative docuseries “The Way Down” on Sept. 30 of last year. It detailed Gwen Shamblin Lara’s rise from being a diet guru with her Weigh Down Workshop (launched in 1986) to the founding of her Tennessee church, Remnant Fellowship, in 1999. According to ex-congregants and diet followers featured in “The Way Down,” Shamblin Lara exerted unwelcome, cult-leader-like control over their lives.

Kate Aurthur editor The Aug. 6 address before the assembly at Remnant Fellowship — delivered to an in-person gathering in Brentwood, TN, and via webcast to anyone who might want to watch — began typically enough, with congregants watching an old video sermon from Gwen Shamblin Lara, the church’s late founder who died in a plane crash on May 29, 2021. What happened after the video portion ended, though, was unusual. In a portion of the sermon, obtained by Variety, Elizabeth Hannah, Lara’s daughter and a leader at Remnant, called in, as she sometimes does. But instead of her usual teachings for Saturday service, Hannah delivered a homily of schadenfreude aimed directly at HBO Max, the enemy of Remnant and the Shamblin family.

Just a bit ago, I learned that Robert Douglas Dalton—best known as Roman Polanski’s long-time lawyer—had died.

EXCLUSIVE: The Woodstock Film Festival will give honorary awards to Ethan Hawke, Awkwafina, Leave No Trace director Debra Granik and IFC Films president Arianna Bocco this fall.

If you thought last month’s release of previously sealed testimony by former prosecutor Roger Gunson in the Roman Polanski sex case put an end to legal jousting over the secret sessions, you thought wrong.

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is hoping to solve the legend of D.B. Cooper, the mystery man who hijacked a Northwest Airlines passenger jet in November 1971 and escaped with $200,000, never to be seen again.

EXCLUSIVE: Charles Finch (Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love) is as English as they come, but Hollywood runs through his veins. Having written movies, produced a few, directed three; managed movie stars and built brands, and published high-end cultural magazines, he decided “smack in the middle of Covid, in my late fifties,” that he wanted to go back to making movies.

EXCLUSIVE: HBO Max docuseries The Way Down: God, Greed & The Cult of Gwen Shamblin is set to be adapted as a scripted series.

HBO Max has more to explore within the Remnant Fellowship Church. A trailer released Tuesday gives a look at Part 2 of the docuseries “The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin,” which explores the controversial church and its following. Part 1 launched on HBO Max in September.

The team behind HBO Max docuseries The Way Down: God, Greed & The Cult of Gwen Shamblin debuted footage from its second part at SXSW.

Matthew Carey In ESPN’s hit documentary series The Last Dance, NBA legend Michael Jordan is described as “the ultimate sports alpha male.” True, perhaps. But he faces some competition for that title from the subject of another ESPN documentary, Lance Armstrong.“To me, Lance was very alpha,” observes director Marina Zenovich, who spent two years off and on with Armstrong for her film LANCE.

If Michael Jordan worried that fans would think he is a "horrible guy" after watching, then Lance Armstrong must be at least slightly sweating the premiere of his own ESPN documentary special.

In 2017, director Marina Zenovich had just finished the HBO doc Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind when she received an unexpected call from ESPN’s Libby Geist, who wanted to gauge the filmmaker’s interest in disgraced pro cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Late in the film “Lance,” a documentary that depicts the ascent and the crash of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, the subject recalls the disappearance of his lucrative sponsorships. These deals — with a massive market value and a perhaps more important intangible value of keeping him in the public eye as a figure of rectitude and hard work — were in some sense his life’s work, and they vanished after his 2013 admission that he had used illegal doping throughout his cycling career.