The first trailer for the upcoming series, Payroll, has been released.
It is a half-hour serious comedy about a group of three young, Black men from New York City who quit everything to start the largest music and tech festival that the city has ever seen. However, they quickly learn a harsh reality that business isn’t done by the book, and any wrong move can cost them the future they’ve bet everything on.
The official synopsis: We follow this journey through the lens of Dom, a 24-year-old Black male. He pairs his street savvy and his corporate know-how to create BandoFest, the world’s largest media festival. And he convinces his two best friends, Cam and Jaxon, to join him on this adventure. In trying to produce the festival, they begin to learn how their personalities can reach success when working together or fail for the very same reasons after being tested time and time again. As the anticipation for the festival grows, the characters are forced to commit to the future they’ve dreamt of, together, or revert back to their old life, if it still exists.
The series stars social media sensation TravQue, Good Trouble star J. Mallory McCree and Orange is the New Black star Branden Wellington.
Payroll is written and created by Dennis Williams II. The series is a Campsight Studios production. It is co-directed by Williams and Spike Lee protege Stefon Bristol. The latter directs the Spike Lee-produced sci-fi feature, See You Yesterday, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month ahead of its Netflix debut. Jesse Martin is an exec producer and Jared Adkins is a producer.
Williams, a LinkedIn Top Voice in 2016 and 2017, got his start as a freelance creative writer for Funny or Die in 2013. That same year, his script, Routine, was selected as a semi-finalist at the Nantucket Film Festival. His latest short film, Note to Self, was selected at the HollyShorts Film Festival, Charlotte Film Festival in 2017 and the Jack Daniels Real to Reel Festival 2018, among others.
An exclusive first look at Payroll was presented at Bandofest, a branded, interactive tech and music experience not only designed for the series but to also capture the essence of what BandoFest will become in its entirety.
Photo: Rian Watkins
(Pictured: Chase W. Dillon, left; Thuso Mbedu, center; Aaron Pierre, right)
Barry Jenkins’ Amazon series based on the Colson Whitehead book “The Underground Railroad” is beginning to take shape.
Variety has learned that the cast will be led by Thuso Mbedu as Cora, with Chase W. Dillon as Homer, and Aaron Pierre as Caesar. The project was first set up more than two years ago on the heels of Jenkins’ Oscar wins for the film “Moonlight,” with Amazon officially ordering it to series last June.
Mbedu is an established star in her native South Africa. She is known for roles in shows such as “Is’thunzi,” “Liberty,” and “Shuga.” In both 2018 and 2019 she received an International Emmy Award nomination for her role in “Is’thunzi.” Also in 2018, Mbedu was featured on the cover of Forbes Africa’s annual “Under 30” issue highlighting young African stars and leaders. She is repped by ICM and Creative Partners Group.
Dillon currently has a recurring role in the upcoming BET series “First Wives Club” from Tracy Oliver. He also has been cast in the role of Young Igwe in “Little America” at Apple.
Pierre is a graduate of the prestigious LAMDA in London. He just wrapped on the second season of David S. Goyer’s SyFy series “Krypton” and was last seen in Jez Butterworth’s Amazon series “Brittania” and in the ITV miniseries “Prime Suspect 1973.” He is repped by Hamilton Hodell in the UK and Anonymous Content in the US.
“The Underground Railroad” chronicles young Cora’s journey as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. After escaping her Georgia plantation for the rumored Underground Railroad, Cora discovers no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad full of engineers and conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil.
Jenkins will direct all 11 episodes of the one-hour series in what will be his first attempt at directing a TV series in its entirety. Jenkins’ Pastel Productions will executive produce along with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. Pitt and Plan B also produced “Moonlight.”
Source: Variety
(Pictured: Chase W. Dillon, left; Thuso Mbedu, center; Aaron Pierre, right)
Son of the South, the upcoming Spike-Lee produced civil rights drama film, has tapped its cast. The movie is based on a true story.
Lucas Till, Lucy Hale, Lex Scott Davis, and Cedric the Entertainer are set to star. Julia Ormond, Sharonne Lanier, Brian Dennehy, and Chaka Forman have also landed roles.
The film is directed and written by Lee’s longtime editor, Barry Alexander Brown. The two have collaborated a multitude of times, with the first time being 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It. According to Variety, who broke this story, the film has already begun shooting in Montgomery, Alabama.
The film, based on the autobiography of Bob Zellner, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, is about Zellner, the grandson of a KKK member who gets involved with the civil rights movement in the early 1960s.
It sounds like something that is in Lee’s recent wheelhouse, bearing thematic similarities to BlacKkKlansman
Till will star as Zellner, and Hale will be his girlfriend. Davis’ role is unknown. Cedric the Entertainer will be Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Lanier will be Rosa Parks. Julia Ormond will portray Virginia Durr, Dennehy will be Zellner’s grandfather and Chaka Forman will play his father, civil rights activist Jim Forman.
Davis broke out last year with starring roles in the films Superfly and The First Purge. On the television front, she starred in CBS’ short-lived Training Day series in 2017 and was the lead in the buzzy For Love magic pilot at ABC. She was set to star with Brenda Song in the upcoming Hulu comedy, Dollface, but it was recast with Shay Mitchell.
Cedric the Entertainer is running high on the success of his CBS series, The Neighborhood, as well as another series he stars in, TNT’s The Last O.G. Last year, he also starred in A24’s critically acclaimed film, First Reformed.
Source: Shadow & Act, Variety
Lucy Hale and Lucas Till are starring in Spike Lee’s civil rights drama “Son of the South,”.
“Son of the South” is based on the Bob Zellner autobiography, “The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement.” Zellner, an Alabama native and grandson of a Ku Klux Klan member, is pulled into the center of the civil rights movement in 1961.
Till (the “X-Men” franchise) is starring as Zellner and Hale as Carol Ann, Zellner’s college girlfriend. Lex Scott Davis (“Superfly”) is also starring along with Julia Ormond as Virginia Durr, Cedric the Entertainer as Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Sharonne Lanier as Rosa Parks. Brian Dennehy plays Zellner’s grandfather. Chaka Forman is portraying his activist father Jim Forman.
Lee is executive producing with his longtime editor Barry Alexander Brown directing from his own screenplay. Lee won the Academy Award for the “BlacKkKlansman” adapted screenplay and Brown received an editing nomination.
“Son of the South” has started shooting in Montgomery, Ala., where many of the events took place. The producers are Colin Bates (“Maggie”), Eve Pomerance (“As Good as Dead”), Bill Black (“Bayou Caviar”), Stan Erdreich, and River Bend Pictures (“Coming Through the Rye”).
Lee and Brown’s collaboration dates back to 1986’s “She’s Gotta Have It,” and includes “Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X,” and “Inside Man.” Brown also co-directed the Academy Award-nominated documentary “The War at Home.”
Source: Variety
Be prepared, Insecure fans. Issa Rae’s popular HBO show won’t be back until 2020. Turns out Rae is a little too busy for HBO right now.
“Well, Issa became a big movie star!”said HBO programming president Casey Bloys to Vulture. “We’re not the first place to deal with this, but when you’re in business with very creative and talented people, there are a lot more opportunities for people to do things. Issa, I think, partly wanted a break to come back fresh.”
Along with Insecure, Westworld, starring Tessa Thompson, Jeffrey Wright and Thandie Newton, will also come back in 2020, with Lena Waithe now joining the cast.
Insecure‘s hiatus will allow for the show to come back after some dust has settled at HBO, which is in the middle of a juggling act with new content and new viewership threats from streaming services like Netflix, which bested them at the Emmys last year, breaking their 18-year streak as the most nominated network. The Hollywood Reporter talked with Bloys and WarnerMedia’s Bob Greenblatt about their slate for the 2019-2020 season. According to the two executives, HBO’s expansion has to do with the network’s programming becoming part of WarnerMedia’s streaming service, set to debut later this year. The network itself also plans to blitz its viewers with more content by opening up “a second night of programming on Mondays later this year,” according to the article.
“This year, we increased the volume of programming by 50 percent to 150 hours and there’s not one show in 2019 that we wouldn’t have done two years ago–or five years ago,” said Bloys. “We were able to do more because of the resources but we have not sacrificed quality just to get the numbers up. They’re all great shows and we haven’t made any compromises in the kinds of shows that we’re doing.”
“And this is a strategy that Casey and his team have been thinking about for the past year,” added Greenblatt. “There are some shows that are in the mix over the next couple of years that–I won’t say departures–but they are expanding what this company has done and who it has spoken to. A show like Euphoria, for example, is in the zeitgeist of the great quality that HBO stands for but will speak to a significantly younger audience.”
The two also discussed how creators like J.J. Abrams, who Greenblatt and Bloys are trying to keep with WarnerMedia amid competitive deals from other studios, and Rae’s work with HBO, which includes a 2016 first look deal with the network, is still seen as important to the company.
“We have a deal with her but she can work through Warner Bros. Television or a do a doc at CNN if she wants,” said Bloys. “There are deals that contemplate working across the company, not to the level of a J.J. deal or what that might look like, but we have done things like this and are continuing to do so.”
Even though Westworld and Insecure are taking a back seat, Regina King will step up to the plate as the lead in HBO’s Watchmen series, set to premiere this year. Also, the Zendaya-led, gritty teen drama, Euphoria, which is produced by Drake, premieres this August. These two, along with Dwayne Johnson’s Ballers and Robin Thede and Rae’s A Black Lady Sketch Show, are ensuring that Black creatives will be kept front and center.
Source: Shadow & Act, Vulture
NEW YORK (AP) — Aretha Franklin is still getting R-E-S-P-E-C-T after death: The Queen of Soul received the Pulitzer Prize Special Citation honor Monday, becoming the first individual woman to earn a special citation prize since the honor was first awarded in 1930.
The Pulitzer board said the award was given to Franklin for “her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades.”
Franklin died on Aug. 16 at her home in Detroit from pancreatic cancer at age 76.
The superstar musician was the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when she entered the prestigious organization in 1987.
The Pulitzer board most recently awarded a special citation prize in 2010 to Hank Williams, the country music legend who died in 1953. From the arts world, other recipients include Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, George Gershwin, Ray Bradbury, William Schuman, Milton Babbitt, Scott Joplin, Roger Sessions, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Before Monday, only 41 special citation prizes had been awarded since 1930, and winners have ranged from individual people to organizations and groups, including the New York Times, writers E.B. White, Alex Haley and Kenneth Roberts, and Columbia University and its Graduate School of Journalism. Franklin and the Capital Gazette newspaper received special citation honors this year.
“Aretha is blessed and highly favored even in death. She’s continued to receive multiple awards — she’s received almost every award imaginable and now to get the Pulitzer Prize, it’s just amazing,” Sabrina Owens, Franklin’s niece and the executor of her estate, said in an interview with The Associated Press on Monday. “Aretha continues to bless us with her music and just paving the way for women going forward. It’s thrilling. She would be so happy right now.”
When Owens heard the news that Franklin won a Pulitzer, she and the family were “surprised but in another way we were not because that’s just the kind of person Aretha was.”
“She was just very gifted and talented, and the world is still recognizing that,” she said.
Franklin’s inclusion into the exclusive club re-confirms the impact her music — and voice — had and continues to have on the world. She became a cultural icon and genius of American song, considered by many to be the greatest popular vocalist of her time. Her voice transcended age, category and her own life.
Franklin was professional singer and accomplished pianist by her late teens and a superstar by her mid-20s. Raised in Detroit, she recorded hundreds of tracks and had dozens of hits over the span of a half century, including 20 that reached No. 1 on the R&B charts.
But her reputation was defined by an extraordinary run of Top 10 smashes in the late 1960s, from the morning-after bliss of ”(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” to the wised-up “Chain of Fools” to her unstoppable call for “Respect,” transforming Otis Redding’s song into a classic worldwide anthem — especially for the feminist and civil rights movements — making it one of the most recognizable and heard songs of all-time.
She sold millions of albums and won countless awards, including 18 Grammys, the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
She performed at the inaugurations of Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and even sang at the funeral for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks and at the dedication of Martin Luther King Jr’s memorial.
Rolling Stone ranked Franklin No.1 on its list of the Top 100 singers and she was also named one of the 20 most important entertainers of the 20th century by Time magazine, which celebrated her “mezzo-soprano, the gospel growls, the throaty howls, the girlish vocal tickles, the swoops, the dives, the blue-sky high notes, the blue-sea low notes. Female vocalists don’t get the credit as innovators that male instrumentalists do. They should. Franklin has mastered her instrument as surely as John Coltrane mastered his sax.”
Franklin was born in Memphis, Tennessee, though her family moved to Buffalo, New York, and then settled in Detroit. She grew up singing in the church alongside her father Rev. C.L. Franklin, a prominent Baptist minister who recorded dozens of albums of sermons and music. She joined him on tour and she released a gospel album in 1956. Four years later, she signed with Columbia Records and when her contract ran out in 1966, she joined Atlantic Records.
That’s when she blazed the pop and R&B charts with a string of hits, including “Respect,” ″I Say a Little Prayer,” ″Think,” ″Chain of Fools,” ″Day Dreaming,” ″(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone,” ″Rock Steady” and “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do).”
Her Grammy-winning album, “Amazing Grace,” is one of the seminal albums in not only Franklin’s discography, but the canon of American pop music. It is the basis for the recently released concert film “Amazing Grace,” filmed over two sessions in January 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts section of Los Angeles.
STXfilms has set its strip-club drama “Hustlers,” starring Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu and Cardi B, for a Sept. 13 release in North America.
Lopez announced the date on her Instagram account on Monday.
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Thass right 🤫 SEPTEMBER 13. @hustlersmovie coming to a theater near you.💰#BergdorfDelirium
Lili Reinhart, Keke Palmer, Julia Stiles and Mercedes Ruehl are also in the cast. The film is being directed by Lorene Scafaria.
The movie, originally set up at Annapurna as “The Hustlers at Scores,” is inspired by a New York Magazine article by Jessica Pressler. It’s set in New York City in the wake of the financial crisis and follows a crew of savvy former strip club employees who band together to turn the tables on their Wall Street clients.
STXfilms is producing alongside Lopez, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas and Benny Medina — who previously collaborated with the studio on the 2018 romantic-comedy “Second Act” — as well as Adam McKay, Will Ferrell and Jessica Elbaum for Gloria Sanchez Productions. Kate Vorhoff and Catherine Hagedorn are overseeing the film’s production for the studio. STXinternational is handling international distribution, and distributing directly in the U.K. and Ireland.
The release date is a week after Warner Bros. launches “It: Chapter Two.” “Hustlers” is the third title dated for Sept. 13, joining Warner’s drama “The Goldfinch” and Fox’s animated “Spies in Disguise.”
Source: Variety
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” just got more marvelous.
“This Is Us” star Sterling K. Brown has signed on for an unspecified role in the third season of the critically-acclaimed Amazon comedy series. Brown made the announcement in a video posted on his official Twitter account Monday morning.
“I’m Eastward bound,” Brown said in the video, which can be viewed in full below. “I’m going to do a little TV show, maybe you’ve heard of it: ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.’ The Palladinos were kind enough to write a little something for your boy, and I said yes. So, stay tuned. I’m getting together with Midge and it’s going to be awesome.”
Brown won back-to-back Emmys in 2016 and 2017 for his starring roles in “American Crime Story: People v. OJ Simpson” and “This Is Us” respectively. He also had a role in the Oscar-winning Marvel film “Black Panther” and the recent new installment in the “Predator” franchise.
Brown is repped by Innovative Artists, JWS Entertainment, and Bloom Hergott.
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” is written and directed by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino. It stars Rachel Brosnahan, Tony Shalhoub, Alex Borstein, Michael Zegen, Marin Hinkle, Kevin Pollak, and Caroline Aaron. The series won eight Emmy Awards for its first season, including best comedy series, best actress in a comedy series (Brosnahan), and best supporting actress in a comedy series (Borstein).
I’m beyond excited to share some pretty marvelous news… #MrsMaisel, I’m coming for you!🙌🏿🙌🏿🙌🏿 @MaiselTV @PrimeVideo pic.twitter.com/0QCVhJSgSJ
— Sterling K Brown (@SterlingKBrown) April 15, 2019
Source: Variety
The gambler, playboy and original owner of the Millennium Falcon, Lando Calrissian, is back.
Billy Dee Williams took the stage at Star Wars Celebration in Chicago on Friday, showing fans the first look at Lando in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”
First look of Billy Dee Williams back in his Lando Calrissian cape for #EpisodeIX revealed at #StarWarsCelebration. “How did I find Lando again? Lando never left me!” https://t.co/Odfoxf635j pic.twitter.com/tnhcSCYTec
— Variety (@Variety)
It’s been 36 years since Lando last graced the screen in “Return of the Jedi,” and fans have been wondering where he’s been since J.J. Abrams began his modern trilogy in 2015. When asked what it was like playing the character again after so much time had passed, Williams remarked that it was easy.
“How did I find Lando again? Lando never left me!” he said.
Williams is one of the last original actors whose character is still alive in the franchise. Considered one of the main characters, along with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Leia Organa, only Carrie Fisher’s Leia is still alive for “The Rise of Skywalker.” Donald Glover took over for a brief stint in “Solo: A Star Wars Story” last year, showing Lando’s origin and how he met Han.
Abrams added several new cast members to “Episode IX,” including Naomi Ackie, who was revealed to play the mysterious Jannah. At the panel, host Stephen Colbert grilled Ackie on if she plays Lando’s daughter, but she danced around the question, saying the notorious playboy could have children all around the galaxy.
“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” hits theaters on Dec. 20.
Source: Variety