Sezione News

Josh Duvendeck is the latest performer cast in Fox’s In Living Color reboot, executive produced by Keenan Ivory Wayans. He joins previously cast Kali Hawk, Jennifer Bartels, Jermaine Fowler and Lilrel Howery. The new In Living Color, which starts production this month, will debut as two half-hour specials. Duvendeck, repped by Coast To Coast and Management 101, recurred on NBC’s Park & Recreation and has a supporting role in the Seth Macfarlane’s upcoming feature Ted. Nicholas Braun has landed one of the two leads in CBS’ comedy pilot Friend Me, about twenty-something best friends, Evan and Rob (Braun), who move from their hometown of Bloomington, Indiana to Los Angeles to begin their exciting new lives working at Groupon. Also cast in the pilot is actor-comedian Dan Ahdoot as Reggie, an ethnically diverse indie filmmaker. He is with Innovative and manager Barry Katz. Groundling alumna Colleen Smith has been cast in CBS’ untitled Martin Lawrence comedy pilot, stars Lawrence as Ray, a widowed father of two teenagers who, after losing his job in construction, decides to go to the police academy and become a cop at the age of 46. Smith, repped by DSA Agency, will play ... Read More »

Quentin Taratino's "Django Unchained" has to be one of our most anticipated movies of the year based on the concept and cast alone. If you haven't heard yet, Jamie Foxx plays the titular Django, an escaped slave who is taken under the wing of a German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz, played by Christoph [...]

Double O agent James Bond is not simply another member of her majesty's secret service. He's also a talented ad man. Two different news items today profiled the more promotional side of 007. First it was announced that Daniel Craig would participate in an upcoming short film as Bond to help open the 2012 Summer [...]

Mirror Mirror may not have burned up the box office in its opening weekend. Its estimated $19 million made the family film a distant and weak third, but that won’t stop a trend among Oscar winning actresses from going evil. Not since Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia DeHavilland and other multi-Oscared legends collectively turned to horror films in order to regain boxoffice clout in the early 60′s have we seen so many Oscar winning actresses decide bad is good for a career, at least as far as playing mean queens and witches. Taking a cue from the billion dollar success of Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland which featured a hilarious turn by Oscar nominated Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, it seems a plethora of Academy Award winning female stars have jumped on the fairy tale evil bandwagon, perhaps in order to prove that Oscar also can still mean gold where it counts, at the boxoffice where none of this award-laden crop have been ‘the fairest of them all’ lately. Mirror Mirror’s conniving queen Julia Roberts is just the tip of the iceberg of this trend. Now with Charlize Theron in June’s Snow White And The Huntsman , Angelina ...

Movie pitch: two lifelong best friends hit the streets of Boston, Massachusetts. One of them is a smart-mouthed, super-ripped local (okay, he's Mark Wahlberg, obviously). The other, an even fouler-mouthed talking teddy bear. Sounds like a winning combo, right? Somebody certainly thinks so, or else this gloriously red-band trailer for Seth MacFarlane's "Ted" would not [...]

EXCLUSIVE: BET has assembled the cast of Y.M.O.C. aka Young Man On Campus, a comedy pilot starring Jacob Latimore as a 15-year-old college prodigy Jacob Matthews who is the youngest man on campus, sharing a dorm at Mt. Pleasant University with his basketball star cousin Marco. The main characters from Y.M.O.C., Latimore’s Jacob Matthews, his mother and his cousin Marco, were introduced in an episode of BET’s comedy series Reed Between The Lines, which aired in December. Latimore and Eric D. Hill, Jr., who played Marco, will reprise their roles in the pilot, while the role of Jacob’s widow mom Trishelle is being recast. The Steve Harvey Show alumna Terri Vaughn has been tapped for the part, described as an earthy mama bear who truly wants Jacob to have every advantage in life that she didn’t. She got a second job driving the campus bus at Mt. Pleasant five years ago to get an employee discount on her children’s tuition, and while Jacob got in on a scholarship, she keeps the job to keep an eye on him. On Reed, the role was played by Dawnn Lewis. Also cast in the pilot in newly created roles are Dondre Whitfield as ...

Bewkes’ package is insanely rich by any normal measure — but puts him at the bottom of the pack among CEOs of Big Media companies that have already released proxy statements for 2011. (This year’s breakdown for Bewkes: $2M salary, $6.1M stock awards, nearly $4M option awards, $13.5M non equity incentives, 253,280 change in pension value, and $97,966 for other compensation.) Although Time Warner shares appreciated 11.9% last year, the board dinged his bonus because the company “did not surpass the financial targets by as great an amount as it did in 2010.” Still, Bewkes’ pay was lopsided when compared to the four other highest paid Time Warner execs. His package amounted to almost as much as the other four combined, and was 3.9 times higher than their average compensation. Corporate governance watchdogs consider it troublesome when a CEO makes more than three times the average for the company’s other top officers.

UPDATED: AMC’s The Killing opened its second season with 1.8 million viewers tuning in for its two-hour premiere, 661,000 of them in the adults 18-49 demographic. That was down 33% and 26%, respectively, from the mystery series’ debut last April. Was it a lingering backlash from the first season ending with no resolution? For the night, The Killing drew a total of 2.5 million viewers for the 8 PM and 11 PM airings. Last year’s impressive cume, 4.7 million, included 2 encores, at 11 PM and 1 AM. At 10 PM, Mad Men (2.9 million total viewers, 1.3 million adults 18-49) was down 17% in viewers from last week’s two-hour fifth season premiere, 19% in 18-49. Meanwhile, the second season finale of Showtime’s Shameless drew 1.45 million viewers, up 26% from the Season 1 finale. Through 8 weeks of total data, Shameless‘ season two is running 29% above last season. The freshman season finale of House of Lies posted 775,000 viewers, down from the 1.03 million for the series premiere but up from the dark comedy’s most recent airings. Californication ended its fifth season with 768,000 viewers, up 40% from the Season 4 closer. No numbers yet for the second ...

It’s the most successful Hammer film ever, grossing over $100 million worldwide, and it should come as no surprise that The Woman In Black is to get a sequel. Entitled The Woman In Black:Angels of Death, the film will be set 40 years after the original and focuses on the concept of a couple and the experience they have when they encounter the haunted setting of Eel Marsh House. Obviously, set 4 decades later, its a distinct possibility that Daniel Radcliffe won’t be in it. That said, makeup artists can work wonders! Full PR below. Simon Oakes, Vice-Chairman of Exclusive Media and President & CEO of Hammer and Guy East and Nigel Sinclair, Co-Chairmen of Exclusive Media, Hammer’s parent company, announced today that Hammer and Talisman are in development on Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black: Angels Of Death, a new film which continues the story of The Woman in Black 40 years on. The Woman in Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe and directed by James Watkins (Eden Lake) has become...

UPDATE, 2:16 PM: DirecTV’s charges that Tribune negotiated in “bad faith” are “nothing more than negotiating tactics in an attempt to unfairly disadvantage Tribune from receiving fair market compensation” for its stations, the broadcaster says. In response to DirecTV’s claim that they had a basic deal on Thursday, Tribune says it “never reached agreement with DirecTV on all the terms of the contract — not in principle, not by handshake, and not on paper.” And the satellite company’s suggestion that private equity firms control Tribune — and therefore its broadcast licenses — “is simply false and misleading.” Tribune says that it’s seeking payments of less than a penny a day for each DirecTV customer who can see its stations and pay TV service WGN America. PREVIOUS, 12:52 PM: In a bitterly worded filing, the satellite company asks regulators to require Tribune to extend its previous carriage agreement for one month. That would enable DirecTV to resume beaming Tribune’s 23 TV stations — including several Fox and CW affiliates — to about 6M of its customers as well as pay TV service WGN America. They’ve been unavailable to subscribers since Sunday morning. DirecTV says that Tribune negotiated in “bad faith”; the ...