Yep, It’s Slow: How A Potential Strike & Industry Pivoting Has Hollywood At A Standstill

EXCLUSIVE: The writers are organized. There have been thousands of writers picketing outside of the traditional Hollywood studios from Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros. as well as the tech upstarts Netflix and Amazon.

Dianna Agron is getting candid about her career.

Sharon Osbourne is opening up about her experience trying weight loss drugs.

The Super Bowl Halftime Show is one of the biggest stages an artist can book!

When dentist Kailesh Solanki set up the first Kissdental clinic in the suburbs of Flixton in 2005, he knew he wanted to offer high-quality cosmetic and restorative dentistry in order to make the practice a success.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike has garnered attention from other film industry unions around the world.

Unlike Covid, which forced a sudden and immediate shutdown of feature film productions that ultimately cost the studios anywhere north of $30 million per pic, the Hollywood majors have been planning and bracing for the WGA strike that began today since last fall.

EXCLUSIVE: Terrence Howard (Empire), JB. Smoove (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and Rebecca De Mornay (Jessica Jones) are set to star in Giving Thanks, a coming-of-age comedy set in Inglewood, California that will go into production in June.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer With half a day to go until the clock strikes midnight on WGA talks, Hollywood is trying to operate as if it were any other day in town, despite the fact TV and film writers could be on strike Tuesday if the negotiations don’t go their way. While high and low-budget shows alike shoot in Los Angeles, New York City, Georgia and across the pond Monday, everyone from writers on sets to executives in office buildings knows Tuesday might bring a situation they haven’t dealt with since 2007. “As expected, it is eerily quiet — it is overcast in LA and that matches the mood of the town,” one comms exec said. “Lots of discussion about what news to announce and how news will play with both sides of the table, so to speak. Definitely feels like the calm before the storm.”

In Hollywood history, no Oscar-winning couple has earned greater admiration than Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The actors who were married for 50 years before Newman’s death in 2008 are the subject of the six-part CNN Films/HBO Max documentary series The Last Movie Stars, directed by Ethan Hawke, himself a four-time Oscar nominee. 

Hollywood has been a union town for close to 100 years. In that time, there have been a little over a dozen major labor strikes, the last being the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America work stoppage, which lasted 14 weeks and had a profound impact on the industry.

 has come to an end. The affable host made his final appearance on Thursday, and was joined by some famous friends and surprise guests.Before the actual finale, Corden hosted a primetime special that featured pre-taped segments — including his final Carpool Karaoke with Adele, which was released online ahead of the finale episode.The primetime special also featured some fun moments with his longtime friend and stunt-buddy Tom Cruise doing something to truly get their adrenaline pumped up — live musical theater.

 has come to an end. The affable host made his final appearance on Thursday, and was joined by some famous friends and surprise guests.Before the actual finale, Corden hosted a primetime special that featured pre-taped segments — including his final Carpool Karaoke with Adele, which was released online ahead of the finale episode.The primetime special also featured some fun moments with his longtime friend and stunt-buddy Tom Cruise doing something to truly get their adrenaline pumped up — live musical theater.

Picket signs are being prepared to possibly hit the streets next week, but talks between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers appear to have taken a productive turn in the past 24 hours.

Like many others, Jessica Chastain thinks Viola Davis should’ve nabbed an Oscar nomination at this year’s ceremony for her role in “The Woman King”.

The WGA, in a message to members accompanying its new set of “Strike Rules,” is answering frequently asked questions about a possible strike that could happen as soon as May 2. And the answer to many of the questions is “No.”

The members of One Direction have grown up in front of our eyes.

Malina Saval Associate Editor, Features Michael Trope remembers the day he entered the living room of his childhood home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles to find Cary Grant sipping a martini. Michael’s father, famed attorney Sorrell Trope, was representing Grant in his 1968 divorce from Dyan Cannon.  “My father used to love to tell the story about how Cary Grant became his client,” says Michael Trope, an LA-based trial lawyer and former sports agent.  “Cary Grant went to a mattress store to buy a mattress,” Michael Trope continues. “He was talking to the mattress salesman and testing out mattresses because he wanted to buy a bed. And he started complaining to this mattress salesman about his divorce. The mattress salesman then said, ‘Oh, I went through a divorce. And I had a great experience with my lawyer. He did a really phenomenal job for me.’ And Cary Grant said, ‘Well, who was that?’ And the mattress salesman went and got my dad’s business card and gave it to Cary Grant. And then my dad wound up representing Cary Grant for over 20 years.” 

Malina Saval Associate Editor, Features Entertainment attorney Craig Emanuel, Variety’s 2023 Power of Law honoree, remembers the day he got a phone call asking if he would be interested in meeting with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson.  “I knew that they were meeting with a lot of lawyers around town, and I really didn’t think we were going to get selected,” says Emanuel. “A lot of the other law firms were boutique entertainment firms that had huge client lists.” “Months went by, and I thought, you know, nothing’s happening,” Emanuel continues. “And then Richard Lovett, president of CAA, who reps Tom and Rita, called me one evening on the phone. I was at dinner with my partners, and Richard said, ‘I’ve got some good news, you have a new client.’”

Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning, Part One,” the seventh film in the franchise, is due out this July, while “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part Two” will be unleashed next June. If, somehow, you’ve never seen any of the “Mission: Impossible” movies, they began in 1996 with the Brian De Palma-directed original, an adaptation of the popular, Bruce Geller-created spy series that ran from 1966 to 1973 for 172 episodes and was revived briefly in the late 1980s (that version only ran for two seasons and 35 episodes).