Wildside Head Mario Gianani Talks Venice Contender ‘Finally Dawn’; Hollywood Strikes Knock-On Effect & Success Of ‘The Eight Mountains’

Television is continuing to struggle with original content about the Hollywood strikes.

Drew Barrymore's talk show The Drew Barrymore Show will no longer make its planned return on September 18 during the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strikes that have brought Hollywood to a halt. Barrymore was accused of strike-breaking for her decision to begin filming again without writers.

Back when Casey Wasserman’s bespectacled grandfather Lew Wasserman was Hollywood’s top power broker, he was known to step in to clear up labor stalemates with a sense of fairness and the authority to get cooler heads to prevail. His grandson, whose music/sports powerhouse firm just acquired Brillstein Entertainment Partners, learned a lot from his famed grandfather, and believes he’d have a plan to solve the current AMPTP battle with WGA and SAG-AFTRA, and that he would not have let it get this far, with thousands not getting a paycheck for over five months. Hopefully the resumption of talks this week will bring the kind of resolve Wasserman describes, even if there is so much mistrust between the sides that there is no leader whose word carried the weight that Wasserman’s did back in the day.

The Drew Barrymore Show was met with wide backlash, including from the Writers Guild of America (WGA), who picketed outside CBS Broadcast Center as taping resumed this week.Alyssa Milano told The Associated Press that it was “not a great move” on Barrymore’s part, while Bradley Whitford also spoke out against the decision.“Drew Barrymore would like you to know that undermining union solidarity at the most crucial moment in Hollywood labor history makes her the victim,” he wrote on Twitter. “This has been, like, a super tough week for her.”Barrymore initially defended her decision in a widely-shared video, where she insisted the return of the show would comply with the terms of the strike.

The Hollywood Reporter, The Drew Barrymore Show is produced and distributed by CBS Media Ventures, which is part of Paramount Global — one of the media companies WGA writers are currently striking against. In order to resume production, the show will resume without any writing or literary work so that it is compliant with the terms of the strike.Despite this, the union criticised the move and picketed outside CBS Broadcast Center in New York as taping resumed this week.“I certainly couldn’t have expected this kind of attention,” Barrymore said in a video shared to social media.

A meeting between a group of leading showrunners including Kenya Barris and Noah Hawley and WGA leadership has been canceled.

Sean Penn is getting candid about politics and the Oscars.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Nicola Maccanico, a former Warner Bros. and Sky Italia senior exec, has been spearheading the radical overhaul of Rome’s Cinecittà Studios since June 2021, when the government-owned facilities secured a multi-million dollar loan provided by the European Union’s post-pandemic recovery fund to upgrade and expand the iconic facilities. Under Maccanico’s watch, the studios – which now boast 20 state-of-the-art soundstages and one of Europe’s largest LED walls – have become a magnet for Hollywood productions, such as Netflix’s period soap “The Decameron” and Roland Emmerich’s gladiator series “Those About to Die,” which is still currently shooting.

Beetlejuice 2 director Tim Burton has revealed that filming for the sequel was “99 per cent done” just before the SAG-AFTRA strike shut the production down. The follow up to 1988’s Beetlejuice began filming in London in May of this year, but was put on indefinite pause once the SAG-AFTRA strike began on July 14.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Since the Hollywood strikes began back in May, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw have donated a collective $1.5 million to writers, actors and other industry workers who have been negatively impacted by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Capshaw and Spielbergs generous donations have gone to the Entertainment Community Fund as well as the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s Emergency Financial Assistance Program.

Drew Barrymore’s decision to resume taping her talk show on Monday has kicked off a fight over whether she is violating the rules, or at least the spirit, of the Writers Guild of America strike. On Sunday, WGA East said that the show is “struck” and that any writing on the show would be against the rules. But SAG-AFTRA, which is also on strike, issued its own statement on Monday defending Barrymore.

Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes.The “Blended” actress, 48, took to Instagram Sunday to make it clear to viewers that she “owns this choice” to premiere Season 4 of “The Drew Barrymore Show” on Sept. 18.She began the statement by explaining more about her decision to walk away as host of the MTV Movie & TV Awards in May, days after the WGA strike began, as it was in “direct conflict with what the strike was dealing with which was studios, streamers, film, and television.”“I am also making the choice to come back for the first time in this strike for our show, that may have my name on it but this is bigger than just me,” she wrote.

Jaden Thompson Ryan Murphy has taken to Instagram to announce the creation of the Ryan Murphy Productions Assistance Fund to support the cast and crew of any Ryan Murphy show, past or present, during the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Murphy is the creator behind a myriad of popular shows including “Glee,” “American Horror Story,” “American Crime Story,” “Pose,” “Hollywood” and more. To provide financial assistance to his entertainment industry colleagues who are currently out of work, the veteran showrunner and producer jumpstarted the fund with an out-of-pocket donation of $500,000.

“I don’t know that much in particular about this dispute, but it feels like this is a moment,” said Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav about the current showdown between big cable provider Charter and the Disney.

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Nah Yung Suk, one of South Korea’s most successful TV producers, says the content marketplace in his home country has been divided into two distinct eras: “Before Netflix” and “After Netflix.” On the latest episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business,” Nah Yung Suk offers his observations on the rise of Korean popular culture throughout the world. The producer’s latest series reflects the incredible global growth of content imports and exports: “Jinny’s Kitchen,” an unscripted series for Amazon Prime Video, revolves around the opening of Korean street food restaurant in a small town in southeastern Mexico.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Before cameras ever start rolling on a RadicalMedia movie, staffers are already busy strategizing about where it should eventually premiere. The company, which boasts “The Fog of War” and “Summer of Soul” among its many credits, routinely consults an exhaustive chart that lays out the deadlines to submit a movie to major festivals like Cannes, Sundance and Toronto.

Oscar-winning All Quiet On The Western Front director Edward Berger told a Venice masterclass on Sunday that he hoped the Hollywood strikes would be resolved soon for the sake of everyone working in the production business.

David Fincher is in town today for the world premiere of The Killer starring Michael Fassbender as an assassin who battles his employers, and himself, on an international manhunt while insisting none of it is personal.

Time is a relative construct stretched to the limits of elasticity by Saverio Constanzo with the period drama “Finally Dawn.” The bloated 140-minute runtime begins at a cinema in Rome in 1953 as three women watch the final scene of a saccharine war drama, the light of the big screen coming to reveal a mother and two daughters, one donning the beauty of a Hollywood starlet and the other the beauty of a traditional Italian woman, with big blue eyes framed by thick curly hair. Venice Film Festival 2023: The 17 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch The curly-haired girl is Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci), a shy 21-year-old used to inhabiting the uncomfortable but familiar shadow of her daintier sister, Iris (Sofia Panizzi).

The glory days of Cinecitta are evoked in Finally Dawn (Finalmente l’Alba), a sprawling story of uncertain tone – sometimes thrilled, sometimes appalled and sometimes as generally bewildered as nervous ingenue Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci), an ordinary young woman of Rome who finds herself leading the way through this warren of a Wonderland. Cinecitta has recently revived its fortunes after a long slump, with a slow build of refurbishment and expansion, but director Saverio Costanzo leans heavily into nostalgia for times past, setting his story in the ‘50s when there were still legions of centurions marching around the studio lot and live animals awaiting their close-ups. A lion features here, roaring at passers-by. It may well be the film’s most sympathetic character.