EXCLUSIVE: Nancy Buirski, director of feature doc Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, has signed a development deal with Cineflix Productions.
17.08.2022 - 18:43 / variety.com
K.J. Yossman Steve Coogan’s production company Baby Cow has snapped up a new series from “Stath Lets Flats” star Katy Wix and Adam Drake (“The Chosen”) called “Fat Camp,” Variety can exclusively reveal.Wix, who has also appeared in shows including “Torchwood” and “The Windsors,” has co-written the series with Drake.
She will also star.“Fat Camp” will be centered around a kids’ diet camp and set in the U.K. It was inspired by an article Wix read about real-life camps where parents send their children in a bid to help them lose weight.Wix and Drake will also exec produce alongside Baby Cow CEO Sarah Monteith and Rupert Majendie, Baby Cow’s head of development.Variety understands a bidding war erupted over the series before it landed at Baby Cow, which has also produced shows including “Chivalry,” starring Coogan and Sarah Solemani, Coogan’s “This Time With Alan Partridge,” and “Gavin and Stacey,” which features James Corden.
“Fat Camp” is already in development. “Growing up as a fat teenager, I would have loved to have seen a body like mine on TV, being allowed to be funny and powerful and not the butt of a joke,” Wix tells Variety.
“Adam and I have created a funny, diverse world of lovable, young characters and we can’t wait to join them in their fight to bring down the system that makes them feel small. Off to camp!”Of the script, Monteith says: “Rupert and I read it, and just fell in love with it.
It’s about these kids who are sent to this camp and they’re all there under the premise of losing weight and getting fit and going on diets and that kind of stuff. And it’s just horrific, both horrific in a dark way and horrific in a hilarious way.” “But also there’s a mystery in terms of everything not being as it seems,”
.EXCLUSIVE: Nancy Buirski, director of feature doc Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, has signed a development deal with Cineflix Productions.
In the opening scene of Nancy Burski’s “Desperate Souls, Dark City, and the Legend of ‘Midnight Cowboy’,” Jon Voight tells a story. The actor recalls, with vivid intensity, the conclusion of principal photography for “Midnight Cowboy,” John Schlesinger’s 1969 film adaptation of James Leo Herlihy’s novel.
EXCLUSIVE: Bankside Films has boarded international sales for Steve Buscemi-directed Venice Film Festival drama The Listener, starring Tessa Thompson (Creed).
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Snap announced that it was cutting 20% of its workforce in a bid to contain costs — eliminating nearly 1,300 positions — and that the company will discontinue funding original series. With the moves, Snap estimated it will save $500 million in cash expenses on an annualized basis relative to the second quarter of 2022. That includes a $50 million estimated reduction in fixed content costs with the elimination of Snap Originals. Shares of Snap were up 10% Wednesday in mid-morning trading on the restructuring news, but the stock price is still down more than 75% year to date.
K.J. Yossman Keira Knightley, Kit Harington, Emeli Sandé and Toby Jones are among the celebrities who’ve signed up to explore their family histories in Wonderhood Studios show “My Grandparents’ War.” The second season of the show, which airs in the U.K. on Channel 4, will explore how the stars’ grandparents navigated global conflicts from the killing fields of Kenya to the mountains of Monte Cassino in Italy. The first season starred Helena Bonham Carter, Mark Rylance, Kristin Scott Thomas and Carey Mulligan. All3Media International distributes the show, which will air on PBS in the U.S., SBS in Australia and CBC in Canada.
K.J. Yossman Among the world premieres set for the BFI London Film Festival are Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pinocchio” and Emily Blunt series “The English.” Others include “Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical,” Asif Kapadia’s ballet-infused “Creature,” family animation “My Father’s Dragon” from Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon and Nora Twomey, Jez Butterworth’s “Mammals,” which stars James Corden and “A Spy Among Friends,” starring Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis. The number of feature-length world premieres at the festival has gone up from 11% to 15% since 2019. This year three of those are Netflix productions: “Pinocchio,” “Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical” and “My Father’s Dragon.”
EXCLUSIVE: British producer Rabia Sultana (Sour Milk) has announced the launch of her production company, Sultana Film, unveiling details on two projects that she has in development.
The Lost King, will reduce their role in the extraordinary historical find. One member of the University of Leicester team, Professor Turi King, carried out key DNA studies, providing conclusive evidence and spending hours in the laboratory. “I had to start from scratch, both on the historic work and the modern-day samples from Richard’s living relatives,” said the Canadian-British geneticist.
EXCLUSIVE: Dana Honor, a respected TV producer and development executive, has signed an exclusive overall deal with Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group. Under the pact, Honor will develop and produce projects across various platforms under her newly launched Defining Eve Productions banner.
Thania Garcia Actor and comedian Steve Coogan joined Coldplay on stage for the band’s penultimate show at Wembley Stadium in London Saturday night. Coogan appeared in character as Alan Partridge to sing covers of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” and ABBA’s 1976 hit “Knowing Me, Knowing You.”For night five out of six scheduled shows at Wembley, Coogan emerged on stage as the erratic talk show host from his BBC sitcom series.
K.J. Yossman Baby Cow are the production company behind some of the U.K.’s best-loved comedy shows, including “Gavin and Stacey” with James Corden and Ruth Jones, Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding’s “The Mighty Boosh” and “This Time With Alan Partridge” starring Steve Coogan as the cringe-worthy fictional television host. It was a prescient Coogan who founded Baby Cow alongside producer Henry Normal in 1998, long before talent-led production companies were a thing.
EXCLUSIVE: Blockchain tech company GoldenArk via its subsidiary GoldenArk Media, and independent film start-up Cherry Blossom Studios enter into $10M partnership deal.
EXCLUSIVE: WME has signed the Emmy-winning husband-and-wife filmmaking team of Bryan Storkel and Amy Bandlien Storkel, as well as their non-scripted production company, Sidestilt Films.
British YouTube star Joe Sugg is launching a production company backed by BBC Studios to develop entertainment and factual entertainment formats.
Produced in conjunction with Serbia, Slovenia and Finland, Croatian six-part mini-series The Last Socialist Artefact had the perfect pedigree to take top honors in the Hearts of Sarajevo Awards for TV Series, a regional award set up to celebrate the past year’s best small-screen talent from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Slovenia.
K.J. Yossman James Norton is no stranger to playing less than salubrious characters thanks to his turns as psychopath Tommy Lee Royce in “Happy Valley” and a Russian mafia boss’s son in “McMafia.” In “Rogue Agent” he once again steps into the skin of a man whose moral compass is, to put it lightly, skewed.
King Richard III’s remains in 2012 after the monarch had been lost for 500 years. TIFF, which runs between Sept. 8-18, will screen “The Lost King” in its World Premiere as part of a special presentation.
William Earl MRC leaders Modi Wiczyk and Asif Satchu and Todd Boehly’s Eldridge holding company have reached a deal to carve up their jointly owned assets into separate business entities.Wiczyk and Satchu will retain the MRC production entity, home to TV series including Netflix’s “Ozark” and Hulu “The Great,” and MRC’s investments in content shops Civic Center Media and T-Street.Eldridge will retain Dick Clark Productions and investments in hot indie studio A24, James Corden and Ben Winston’s Fulwell 73, Michael Sugar’s Sugar 23 and audience data firm Luminate. Eldridge also holds on toits minority stake in the PMRC joint venture established in 2020 that is the parent company of Variety, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Vibe, The Hollywood Reporter, Music Business Worldwide, the annual Life is Beautiful music festival and an investment in the SXSW festival franchise that is expanding beyond its Austin, Texas roots next year with an edition in Sydney, Australia.