LOS ANGELES (AP) In the wake of devastating wildfires in Los Angeles that struck at the heart of the movie industry, an embattled Hollywood lined up behind the Netflix narco-musical about trans identity “Emilia Pérez” in Oscar nominations Thursday. Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” a Spanish language, French-made film, dominated the nominations with a leading 13 nominations, including best Read More 

NEW YORK SHOOT’s New Directors Showcase (NDS) Event provided varied industry perspectives during a trio of afternoon sessions, and then an evening display of up-and-coming filmmaking talent with the debut screening of the 2024 Showcase Reel followed by a Meet the New Directors panel discussion, all held at the DGA Theatre in NYC last month (12/9). Capping Read More 

LOS ANGELES (AP) The awards season norm has seen the nearly annual occurrence of at least one difference between the lineups of Best Director Oscar and the DGA Award nominees. In only five of the  77 years of the DGA Awards have the Guild nominations exactly mirrored their Academy Award counterparts. This time around Edward Berger and Coralie Read More 

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) In one of the more wide-open Oscar fields in recent history, there were plenty of nominations surprises Thursday. Not too long ago, it seemed that people like Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman were destined for best actress nominations, while general audience disinterest in the young Donald Trump movie “The Apprentice” might have indicated its awards Read More 

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) Marlee Matlin gives an unflinchingly honest account of her experiences as a deaf actor in the funny and revelatory documentary “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore.” The film kicked off the 41st Sundance Film Festival Thursday, as the first major premiere in the Eccles Theater in Park City, Utah. After the screening audiences in the theater, Read More 

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) The Sundance Film Festival catalogue can be overwhelming to navigate, with around 90 feature films playing across 11 days. This year the Robert Redford-founded independent film festival has something for everyone: Comedies, dramas, horrors, documentaries, the intriguingly undefinable (there’s a movie about cabbage smuggling called “Bubble & Squeak” and one in which a woman becomes Read More 

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) As many in the entertainment industry navigate the devastating effects of the California wildfires, some will soon be decamping to cleaner air in the mountains. The annual Sundance Film Festival begins Thursday in Park City, Utah. The 41st edition of Robert Redford’s brainchild will, as always, be a year of discovery and discussion. There are Read More 

NEW YORK (AP) Steven Soderbergh isn’t just the director and cinematographer of his latest film. He’s also, in a way, its central character. “Presence” is filmed entirely from the POV of a ghost inside a home a family has just moved into. Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews (his father’s name), essentially Read More 

NEW YORK (AP) The SXSW Film & TV Festival will kick off March 7 with the world premiere of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s “The Studio,” the Apple TV+ comedy series starring Rogen as a fictional Hollywood studio head. The Austin, Texas, festival announced its slate Wednesday, unveiling the 96 features, including 82 world premieres, selected for its Read More 

LOS ANGELES & NEW YORK Editor’s note: AICP president and CEO Matt Miller issued the following statement addressing the wildfires in Los Angeles and how the industry can help this key production market–a hub of major resources essential to the health of the overall commercialmaking industry: Who Needs Los Angeles? We Do. By Matt Miller, AICP president and CEO One Read More 

NEW YORK The results of the AICP National and Regional Board elections are in. On the AICP National Board, all four incumbents were re-elected to serve a two-year term. The three general members director at large seats were won by Yvette Cobarrubias of Cosmo Street, Gloria Pitagorsky of Heard City and Frank Scherma of RadicalMedia. Margaret Capossela Read More 

DALLAS Recently, Fox announced that it has already sold out all of its advertising inventory for this year’s Super Bowl, with advertisers paying as much as $7 million for a :30 spot. And why not? The Super Bowl is consistently the most watched U.S. television event, averaging more than 120 million viewers per Nielsen. Not only Read More 

NEW YORK In anticipation of the continued rising impact of AI in marketing, The One Club for Creativity has added a new Creative Use of Artificial Intelligence discipline to The One Show 2025. The new discipline celebrates the partnership between human creativity and this emerging technology in the evolution of creative work and process. The new AI Read More 

LOS ANGELES The USC Libraries named the finalists for the 37th-annual USC Libraries Scripter Awards, which honor the writers of the year’s most accomplished film and episodic series adaptations, as well as the writers of the works on which they are based. The finalist writers for film adaptation are, in alphabetical order by film –James Mangold and Read More 

WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday to keep TikTok operating for 75 days, a relief to the social media platform’s users even as national security questions persist. TikTok’s China-based parent ByteDance was supposed to find a U.S. buyer or be banned on Jan. 19. Trump’s order could give ByteDance more time to find Read More 

LOS ANGELES (AP) Hollywood’s awards season has all but come to a rare halt as the wildfires continue to disrupt life and work in the Los Angeles area. There are near daily updates from the Hollywood guilds and organizations that put on awards shows as the industry navigates the ongoing crisis. Here’s an overview of the major upcoming Read More 

LOS ANGELES & NEW YORK Production company m ss ng p eces has added Jun Diaz to its directorial roster for U.S. commercial representation. Diaz has helmed dozens of campaigns for brands including the NFL, IKEA, BMW, Samsung, Converse, Mastercard, Seamless, Heineken, eBay, and the Ad Council. He also created a series of captivating films for the Council of Fashion Read More 

MINNEAPOLIS Obele Brown-West has been named president of agency Colle McVoy. The 20-plus year industry vet has supervised integrated communications, media and technology teams. Her expertise spans retail, commerce, CPG, travel, automotive, entertainment, agribusiness, education, healthcare and petcare categories. A sampling of brands she’s stewarded include Chips Ahoy!, Mars Inc. ALDI, MilkPEP, Headspace, Blue Cross Blue Read More 

LOS ANGELES Director Rodney Passé has come aboard the U.S. roster of production company Eleanor for representation spanning commercials, branded content and music videos. His films include the heartwarming Li of Photos and Perserverancia, Son My Gente. Of the former, he shared, “I wanted to show these intimate, human moments. Photography is sentimental. You’re capturing a memory Read More 

LONDON Rogue has announced that Kate Taylor and James Howland–who joined Charlie Crompton as partners in the London production company in 2020–will take the reins as joint owners of the business in the spring, as founder Crompton steps down. Crompton said, “Rogue has launched many, many stellar careers, won numerous awards and worked with the very Read More 

LOS ANGELES Stadium has added director Raúl to its U.S. commercial roster. His collaborations with global brands like Chevy, Coca-Cola, and Amazon have earned him top  industry accolades, including a Cannes Lion and a D&AD Pencil. Known for his sharp comedic timing and character driven campaigns, Raúl had previously been with Cap Gun Collective for U.S. commercial Read More 

SAN FRANCISCO Production agency Avocados and Coconuts has signed director Jessie Zinn for commercials and branded content, marking her first representation in the U.S. Blending documentary and fiction, the South Africa-based Zinn has turned out work for a range of clients, including Ciel Properties, Belmond, Sonnenglas, and Ngwenya Glass. Her documentary films have screened at festivals, including Read More 

LOS ANGELES Good Behavior, the independent comedy commercial production company founded by director Pete Marquis, is expanding into a full-service operation with postproduction capabilities by signing comedy editor Dick Gordon, who has edited with top ad agencies, creatives, directors and brands for over 25 years. His remit at Good Behavior is to edit with the company’s directors, Read More 

LONDON VCCP has promoted Chris Birch and Jonny Parker to chief creative officer level as they continue to grow the network’s creative team at its London headquarters. Parker joined VCCP in 2006 and teamed up with Birch in 2013 before they both stepped up to lead the creative department as executive creative directors in 2022. The Read More 

NEW YORK (AP) Kids movies so often bear little of the actual lived-in experience of growing up, but Naoko Yamada’s luminous anime “The Colors Within” gently reverberates with the doubts and yearnings of young life. Totsuko (voiced by Suzukawa Sayu) is a student at an all-girls Catholic boarding school. In the movie’s opening, she explains how she experiences Read More 

LOS ANGELES (AP) The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s chillingly effective, experiential haunted house drama “Presence.” The filmmaker traps the audience in a beautiful suburban home, letting us drift through rooms with this curious being, in and out of delicate conversations as we (and the ghost) try to piece together a puzzle blindly. Often in haunted Read More 

LOS ANGELES The lineup of officers is set for the Visual Effects Society’s (VES) 2025 Board of Directors. The officers, who comprise the VES Board Executive Committee, were elected at the January 2025 Board meeting. The Officers include Kim Davidson, who was re-elected Board chair, and is the first Board member from outside the United States to Read More 

NEW YORK (AP) Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children’s books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago. Feiffer’s wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive Read More 

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Netflix added nearly 19 million subscribers during the holiday-season quarter to help propel its earnings beyond analysts’ projections, capping the video streaming service’s best year yet in a sign that its expansion into live programming is paying off. The numbers released Tuesday covered a October-December period highlighted by Netflix’s streaming of a widely watched fight Read More 

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