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by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
On the night of Dec. 14, 2025, by about 8:44 pm on that fateful Sunday night before Hanukkah, 99% of Hollywood knew or believed that Rob Reiner had been a victim of parricide. Texts have been flying since.
But in those crucial hours post-slaying, in a small town like Hwood, even the fringes heard the “rumor” that no one other than his son could be the alleged slayer. And that’s the defining moment of 2025 in Hollywood for most...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Mamma Mia's Amanda Seyfreid is back, in sinister mode this time, with Sydney Sweeney in THE HOUSEMAID, opening wide Friday, Dec. 19. Based on the best-selling novel by literal brain doctor Freida McFadden, Amanda’s Nina Winchester is about to twist Sydney’s Millie Calloway into an emotional pretzel in this giddy-making thriller from director Paul Feig.
In case you forgot about CHLOE (2009) where Amanda Seyfried terrorizes a Juli...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
So Quentin Tarantino just named his Top 10 Films of the 21st Century, as least that's what we think he did. The list, which we have cribbed from Screenmancer in LA, has so many flaws it is hard to believe it is authentic. Given Tarantino's upcoming Dec. 5 release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, you wonder if it's just a grenade thrown into the Hollywood spin cycle? Either way, we borrowed a page from Screenmancer for the lowdo...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Tonight, Skydance/Paramount’s David Ellison is reported by The Guardian's White House Correspondent Hugo Lowell to be in attendance for the MBS White House Dinner at President Trump’s invitation. Trump of course is close to the elder Ellison, Larry Ellison of Oracle, backed up by his hundreds of billions. At $23.50 or thereabouts a share, Skydance’s David Ellison, who bought Paramount sometime in August, has been gunning fo...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Imagine you’re a rookie film director, you land Academy Award nominee Patricia Clarkson with her unmistakable New Orleans guile plus a very fine cast including actors John Benjamin Hickey and Thomas Sadoski for a movie about one of America’s unsung, true-life, gutsy working women? Director Rachel Feldman did just that. But there’s a caveat here… it only took 17 years.
Feldman had been coming up in the ranks as a ...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
When you realize Academy Award-nominated Make-up Artist Donald Mowat hand-painted the giant glowing pink face of Ana de Armas in Blade Runner 2049, which most audiences think is a digital special effect, you begin to realize the enormity of a gift like his. While his credits include Dune (2022) which resulted in his Oscar nom, Mowat has a visceral connection to The Fighter and its gritty realism that belies any use of cosmetics. Eminem&rsq...
By Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
It’s 4:03 am in Hollywood, most of Malibu on the PCH is unrecognizable after the fires, and it could be argued that the Town itself is in “The "Je pense, donc je suis" (Cogito ergo sum) Era. What does that even mean?
Roger Penske’s son Jay Penske (born 1980) now owns, or controls via PMC (Penske Media Corp.) the following: “Variety, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Billboard Music C...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Today you are going to become Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, or simple George Méliès, the French magician turned filmmaker who gave the world “A Trip to The Moon,” complete with rocket-induced black eye. Of course if we think rockets, we think Rocketman, formally known as Elon Musk who bought Twitter, dubbed it X, and is now giving away for free an opportunity to try out his text-to-video via prompt applicatio...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Whether you like or loath Elon Musk and his many-hatted empire from X to cars and tunnels to rockets, it’s beyond time to talk about his GROK and Grok Imagine as a disruptor that may upend Hollywood more than Netflix or the other streamers.
This is Part I of 2, by the way; and you may wonder why Grok will rock the Hollywood boat? Because right now Musk is giving away access to Grok Imagine’s considerable film-making capabilities to ...
By Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Photo Ruven Afanador
Three days since Diane Keaton died at age 79 on Oct. 11, 2025, it's been a long sad holiday weekend to process this passing so expect some typos. Al Pacino, who starred with Diane Keaton in THE GODFATHER, tells the best story about her, and how that first meeting Diane had with the legend Marlon Brandon went. They are introduced; he says: “I’m Marlon Brando.” And she says? “Yeah, alright, uh...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Guess what Jack Black has been up to, and no, not another blockbuster Minecraft kind of movie... this time he's returning to what he loves most, music. During the 90's Jack was big on the music scene in a place called Silver Lake near Griffith Park in Los Angeles. He frequented clubs like Spaceland and all the indie venues where the actual working rockers go before hitting the big time. Well, now he's Executive Producer on filmmaker ...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
As everything with Sean Young, who’s busy these days with ComicCon’s, Film work, TV Guest spots, Celebrity appearances, plus a TCM gig with Disney Cruises, the final result is spectacular… if you wait long enough. Actually, that’s an inside joke because actor Sean Young delivers more than promised for her Top 10 assignment. The praying photo of her above is by none other than the late Robert Mapplethorpe.
As they say in...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Remember when JAWS, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this summer, hit screens and changed the way everyone looked at the beach? A few years earlier in 1971, a film by Bruce "Endless Summer" Brown came out that changed the way everyone looked at the dirt. Starring motorcycle buff Steve McQueen, Brown’s On Any Sunday uncorked a two-wheeled frenzy that paved the way for ruts and tracks all over Southern California and beyond.
...
By Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
“Imagine today’s Society as a branch of civilization about to reach a dead end.” You want to defend and explain Francis Ford Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS just as much as narrator Laurence Fishburne, who tries to make the case during the movie that this oddball gorgeous landscape of mildly psychotic imagery is historic. You want to love Adam Driver and his maniacal urban hive-builder genius as someone amazing and heretofore...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
There’s a reason Poor Things starring Best Oscar Actress nom Emma Stone with 11 Oscar nods charts so high among big movies, Oppenheimer with 13 nods, Barbie with eight, and Killers of the Flower Moon at 10 nominations. After #metoo and #timesup, we are officially in the Post-Ingenue Era in Hollywood. Gone is the unsophisticated often preyed-upon female lead. And this is likely why Barbie’s Margot Robbie missed the Best Actress cut th...
By Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
When Nikki Finke died on Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022, it was the Hunter’s Moon, a full moon in Hollywood.
That’s all Nikki, who died at 68, was, a hunter of scoops. With that famous TOLDJA word she coined, for the revenge reveal after the fact. Yes, okay, she was a journalist by trade, show biz news analyst, ground-breaking digital media pioneer founder of Deadline, now owned by Jay Penske’s PMC. But that’s not the whole ...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
After watching documentary HOW THEY GOT OVER, directed by Robert Clem, more than the music of the Soul Stirrers, Dixie Hummingbirds, Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, Sensational Nightingales, the Davis Sisters, and other featured artists stays with you. There’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe in all her glory, guitar on the lap, kind of changing the world for all to see. Released this month from First Run Features, Clem’s sonic odyssey is a his...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
You could say Alexander Skarsgård has gone to ‘rack and rune’ in THE NORTHMAN, but puns aside, this is the Viking epic Robert Eggers hinted at during production. Skarsgård literally breaks himself for this role, changes his body posture even, and just destroys his civilized inner self. Also starring Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Björk, and Willem Dafoe, this movie rips through the screen an...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
At the W Hotel Hollywood this past weekend, the 26th Satellite Awards capped off one of the most protracted Award Seasons in Hollywood history with a touching and emotional tribute from Oscar winner Mira Sorvino for honoree Tom Skerritt (TOP GUN, ALIEN), who recalled that he “started out in $1.98 movies,” joking about the low budget beginnings of a fantastic career on screen. His top honor, The Mary Pickford Award for Outstanding Art...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Hello Aviators, actually earlier today Paramount led with “Good Morning Aviators” as they dropped a new poster and trailer for the long-awaited Navy ace flier sequel to the iconic TOP GUN. There aren’t enough adjectives for the much-needed adrenaline feel-good boost in the footage. But seat yourself for the ride, on this Tom Cruise 2.0 starrer, as David Ellison's Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films offer up a new teaser fo...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
UPDATE: We were way ahead on this one, as The Academy is holding emergency meetings about a vote on all this...
On Japanese TV they carried the entire unedited melee when KING RICHARD’s Will Smith crossed from his front row seat at the 94th Academy Awards to clock comedian Chris Rock in a knee-jerk reaction to a G.I. Jane joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, the f-bomb’s flew with an open-hand crescendo to the presenter’s face that ...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Ironic to hear about a French event all the way in Los Angeles, but this just in about MIPTV 22, from Screenmancer...
NEWS: Leading Ukrainian media companies and creative powerhouses, including Starlight Media, 1+1 media, Ukraine TV Channel, and FILM.UA Group have united their efforts to support Ukraine’s struggle for freedom, defending the democratic values and human rights of all the civilized world, threatened by Russian aggression. Wi...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
In the run up to Sunday, March 27, which is known as Oscar Sunday, we thought it would be fun to join the guessing gang from The Academy. All you have to do is name the actual movie from the Working Title. All this in the company of Questlove (Summer Of Soul), Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter), Andrew Garfield (tick, tick...BOOM!) and 94th Academy Awards Executive Producers Shayla Cowan & Will Packer. Plus Dan Lausten & Luis Se...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Yes, you can still get tickets, and TCM Classic Film Festival 2022 has kind of outdone itself for movie fans with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial's original cast kids, now grown up Drew Barrymore and Henry Thomas, plus Director Steven Spielberg and Producer Kathleen Kennedy for this year's red carpet opening ceremony. Not to mention the screening of ET is on the 40th anniversary of the seminal lovable alien film. Here's all the news ...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
While it is the longest-ever Award Season, with delays and reschedules during these trying times, there are still some surprises to behold on the Award Show front. CODA, about a 17 year old named Ruby in a coastal Massachusetts town who is the only "hearing" member of her family, has truly become a darling of 2022 with a another big win tonight at the 74th Writers Guild Awards.(Last night's PGA Awards named this charmer Best Pictur...
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