Month: April 2018

Categories
Awards

Congrats to them all…finally!!

Reunited Bon Jovi Take Center Stage at 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony

The Cars, Dire Straits, The Moody Blues, Nina Simone & Sister Rosetta Tharpe were also inducted at 33rd annual ceremony.

The Moody Blues’ Graeme Edge expressed the thoughts of many of the members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2018 during the 33rd annual induction ceremony on Saturday night (April 14) in Cleveland’s Public Auditorium. Acknowledging the Moodys’ long period of eligibility before finally being nominated, thanks in part to aggressive campaigning on behalf of the band’s fans, Edge — the oldest living inductee of the evening at 77 — said, “It was so long that we were eligible and didn’t make it that I got a real sour grapes [feeling] for everything about it. … When it actually became something for us all to appreciate and have, I did realize that it means the world to me.”

The Moodys — along with fellow inductees Bon Jovi, The Cars and Dire Straits (and the late Nina Simone and Sister Rosetta Tharpe) — have long been on lists of acts snubbed for Rock Hall induction. Saturday’s more than four-and-a-half-hour ceremony set things right with a prevailing atmosphere of sincere appreciation — including from fans who sat in pouring rain to watch red-carpet arrivals and in the Public Auditorium’s upper level — with only a few barbs about the long waits for induction.

The ceremony, which was filmed by HBO for a May 5 premiere, differed from other years in that Rock Hall co-founder Jann Wenner did not address the gathering and there was no finale that brought inductees and presenters together.

The crowd at Cleveland, Ohio’s Public Auditorium did not have to wait long for what was the clear main attraction of the night. Following The Killers’ tribute to the late Tom Petty with “American Girl” (and a bit of “Free Falling”), Bon Jovi’s hour-plus presentation was presided over by Howard Stern, who gave the band an epic, envelope-pushing-but-loving tribute that took Rolling Stone magazine and Rock Hall co-founder Jann Wenner to task (“Jann required years of pondering to decide if this glorious band that sold over 130 million albums should be inducted. What a tough decision.”) and essayed on everything from Jon Bon Jovi’s use of hairspray to guitarist Richie Sambora’s penis size, as well as the fact that Bon Jovi’s sales eclipsed the death tolls from the bubonic plague, the American Civil War and atomic bomb drops.

He also led the crowd in singing a chorus of “Wanted Dead or Alive,” chided Bon Jovi’s desire to own a National Football League franchise (New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones were band guests on Saturday) and told the frontman that “I’m glad you don’t have to sit at home anymore throwing darts at pictures of Jann Wenner.”

Bon Jovi was equally expansive and earnest in his acceptance speech. Following remarks by each of the band members (“If I wrote a book, it would be [called] The Best Time I Ever Had,” said Sambora, returning to the ranks after leaving for good in 2013), Bon Jovi delivered a nearly 20-minute aural career history, thanking bandmates, management, record company executives, friends and family. “I’ve been writing this speech many days, in many ways — some days, it’s the thank you speech, some days the f— you speech,” he noted, acknowledging the group’s long and controversial exclusion from the Rock Hall. But he kept things mostly positive and sentimental. “It’s about time — that has been the theme of my weekend,” Bon Jovi said, looking at his bandmates. “I thank my lucky stars for the time I got to spend with each of you. Tonight the band that agreed to do me a favor stands before you so I can make this reality a dream.”

With Sambora and original bassist Alec John Such reuniting with the group, Bon Jovi finished with a crowd-pleasing set that included “You Give Love a Bad Name,” “It’s My Life,” “When We Were Us” from last year’s This House Is Not for Sale album and “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

Without a designated presenter, Dire Straits bassist and co-founder John Illsley took it upon himself to do the honors and subsequently make an acceptance speech. He quickly addressed the elephant in the room — frontman Mark Knopfler’s decision not to attend — cracking that “I can assure you, it’s just a personal thing,” adding, “It’s for personal reasons, let’s just leave it at that. You’ve got to realize this is really more about a group of people more than one person. It’s a collective, a brotherhood, and that’s something that needs acknowledging tonight … the many musicians who have worked with Dire Straits over the years and made the band’s success possible and led us all the way to Cleveland tonight.

Soft-spoken keyboardist Guy Fletcher noted, “I never thought of Dire Straits as a particularly cool band. … We weren’t really there to be cool.” He also told the group’s fans to “consider this award yours, but if you don’t mind, I’ll look after it.”

The Cars, inducted after two previous times on the ballot and ushered in by Killers frontman Brandon Flowers (“The Cars were the first band I truly fell in love with, and you never forget your first”), spent much of their time paying homage to late bassist/singer Benjamin Orr, a native of Cleveland, much to the delight of the partisan Public Hall crowd. “When the band first started, Ben was supposed to be the lead singer and I was supposed to be the good-looking guy in the band — but after a couple of gigs, I kinda got demoted to the songwriter,” Ric Ocasek, sporting a glittery silver tuxedo jacket, said. “But obviously it’s hard not to notice that Benjamin Orr is not here. He would’ve been elated to be here on this stage. It still feels strange to be up here without him.”

The group’s set, with Weezer’s Scott Shriner on bass and bushy-bearded drummer David Robinson looking sagely behind his kit, included “My Best Friend’s Girl,” “You Might Think,” “Moving in Stereo” — which Flowers called “the best song in any movie scene that pictured a girl getting out of a pool taking her top off” (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) — and “Just What I Needed.”

Both Nina Simone’s younger brother Dr. Samuel Waymon and inductor Mary J. Blige made unapologetically long speeches, with the former thanking Jon Bon Jovi for giving him license to “take as much time as necessary to say what I need to say” about the iconoclastic, genre-blending singer who was the surprise inclusion in this year’s class. While Blige noted that Simone “could sing anything,” Waymon — who managed her for many years — said that “it is the oddest thing for you to induct her because [Simone] is a non-conformist, a non-traditionalist.” He warned artists that “if you’re sampling her, you better pay for it” and added that “she’s sitting next to you. She’s soaring over us tonight.” Andra Day and The Roots followed with renditions of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” and a spectacular “I Put a Spell on You,” while Lauryn Hill came on for a long, showstopping set of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair, ” “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life” and “Feeling Good,” accompanied by video footage of Simone herself.

Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Murphy made brief remarks inducting Sister Rosetta Tharpe as this year’s Early Influence, calling her “the godmother of rock ‘n’ roll” before delivering a sharp rendition of “That’s All.”

In addition to the traditional In Memoriam segment, the ceremony featured two specific tributes. The Killers opened the night playing the late Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” slipping a bit of “Free Fallin’” into the final verse, while Heart’s Ann Wilson and Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell performed an emotive duo version of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” to honor Chris Cornell.

The Moody Blues closed the evening after a salute from inductor Ann Wilson, who reminded the room that in addition to the group’s heady musicianship and ethereal, philosophical lyricism, “The Moody Blues are and always have been a kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll band.” Denny Laine, who co-founded the Moodys as a blues group but left after one album, saluted those who came after him, saying, “I’m really pleased to say these guys…went on to other things, and I’m a big fan. There ya go. The Moody Blues, I love you.”

Little mention was made of co-founder Ray Thomas, who died Jan. 4, but Justin Hayward and John Lodge both thanked American radio disc jockeys who championed the band, while Lodge acknowledged the fans who campaigned so hard for the group, saying, “This is your Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” Hayward explained that “for us and all the British musicians, this is the home of our heroes. To be celebrated even in the same street, in the same building, even in the same town as Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, with the woman who showed us how it all should be done, Nina Simone…it’s a privilege. It means a lot to me.”

The Moodys then picked up their instruments for a set that included “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band),” a galvanizing “Nights in White Satin” and “Ride My See Saw.”

Saturday’s ceremony also introduced a new category: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Singles honored six songs that Little Steven Van Zandt said “shaped rock ‘n’ roll” by “artists in the Rock Hall … at the moment.” The first inductees in the category included “Rocket 88” by Jackie Breston and his Delta Cats (1951), Link Wray and his Ray Men’s “Rumble” (1958), “Louie Louie” by The Kingsmen (1963), Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (1967) and Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” (1968).

Rock Hall President and CEO Greg Harris opened the evening pronouncing that “in a world that is filled with division, rock connects us.” He also celebrated “a time of unprecedented growth” for the museum and announced a $10 million donation from the Key Bank Foundation — the largest-ever single philanthropic contribution — which will be detailed later this spring.

Categories
People

He was a true legend. May he Rest In Peace.

‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ director Milos Forman dead at 86

Czech filmmaker Milos Forman, whose American movies One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus won a deluge of Academy Awards, including best director Oscars, died Saturday. He was 86.

Forman died about 2 a.m. Saturday at Danbury Hospital, near his home in Warren, Conn., according to a statement released by the former director’s agent, Dennis Aspland. Aspland said Forman’s wife, Martina, notified him of the death.

When Forman arrived in Hollywood in the late 1960s, he was lacking in both money and English skills, but carried a portfolio of Czechoslovakian films much admired internationally for their quirky, lighthearted spirit. Among them were Black Peter, Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman’s Ball.

The orphan of Nazi Holocaust victims, Forman had abandoned his homeland after communist troops invaded in 1968 and crushed a brief period of political and artistic freedom known as the Prague Spring.

In America, his record as a Czech filmmaker was enough to gain him entree to Hollywood’s studios, but his early suggestions for film projects were quickly rejected. Among them were an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika and a comedy starring entertainer Jimmy Durante as a wealthy bear hunter in Czechoslovakia.

After his first U.S. film, 1971’s Taking Off, flopped, Forman didn’t get a chance to direct a major feature again for five years. He occupied himself during part of that time by covering the decathlon at the 1972 Olympics for the documentary Visions of Eight.

Taking Off, an amusing look at generational differences in a changing America, had won praise from critics who compared it favourably to Forman’s Czech films. But without any big-name stars it quickly tanked at the box office.

Actor Michael Douglas gave Forman a second chance, hiring him to direct One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which Douglas was co-producing.

The 1975 film, based on Ken Kesey’s novel about a misfit who leads mental institution inmates in a revolt against authority, captured every major Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards, the first film to do so since 1934’s It Happened One Night.

The winners included Jack Nicholson as lead actor, Louise Fletcher as lead actress, screenwriters Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, Forman as director and the film itself for best picture.

The director, who worked meticulously, spending months with screenwriters and overseeing every aspect of production, didn’t release another film until 1979’s Hair.

The musical, about rebellious 1960s-era American youth, appealed to a director who had witnessed his own share of youthful rebellion against communist repression in Czechoslovakia. But by the time it came out, America’s brief period of student revolt had long since faded, and the public wasn’t interested.

Ragtime followed in 1981. The adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel, notable for Forman’s ability to persuade his aging Connecticut neighbour Jimmy Cagney to end 20 years of retirement and play the corrupt police commissioner, also was a disappointment.

Forman returned to top form three years later, however, when he released Amadeus.

Based on Peter Shaffer’s play, it portrayed 18th century musical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a foul-mouthed man-child, with lesser composer Salieri as his shadowy nemesis. It captured seven Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best actor (for F. Murray Abraham as Salieri).

Hunting for locations, Forman realized Prague was the only European capital that had changed little since Mozart’s time, but returning there initially filled him with dread.

His parents had died in a Nazi concentration camp when he was nine. He had been in Paris when the communists crushed the Prague Spring movement in 1968, and he hadn’t bothered to return home, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1975.

The Czech government, realizing the money to be made by letting Amadeus be filmed in Prague, allowed Forman to come home, and the public hailed his return.

“There was an enormous affection for us doing the film,” he remarked in 2002. “The people considered it a victory for me that the authorities had to bow to the almighty dollar and let the traitor back.”

Never prolific, Forman’s output slowed even more after Amadeus, and his three subsequent films were disappointments.

The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) was an ill-advised attempt to paint the Hustler magazine publisher as a free-speech advocate.

Man on the Moon, based on the life of cult hero Andy Kaufman, did win its star, Jim Carrey, a Golden Globe. But it also failed to fully convey Kaufman’s pioneering style of offbeat comedy or the reasons for his disdaining success at every turn.

“Another great one passes through the doorway,” tweeted Carrey. “I’m glad we got to play together. It was a monumental experience.”

Larry Karaszewski, who co-wrote Man on the Moon and The People vs Larry Flynt with Scott Alexander, called Forman “our friend and our teacher” on Twitter. “He was a master filmmaker – no one better at capturing small unrepeatable moments of human behaviour.”

Jan Tomas Forman, born in Caslav, Czechoslovakia, was raised by relatives after his parents’ deaths and attended arts school in Prague.

The director’s first marriage, to actress Jana Brejchova ended in divorce. He left his second wife, singer Vera Kresadlova, behind with the couple’s twin sons when he left Czechoslovakia. He married Martina Zborilova in 1999. They also had twin sons.

Categories
People

Get well soon, Huey!!

Huey Lewis ‘can’t hear music well enough to sing,’ cancels 2018 dates

Veteran rocker Huey Lewis has been forced to scrap all remaining dates on his 2018 calendar so he can focus on hearing loss issues.

The Huey Lewis & the News leader has been diagnosed with Meniere’s disease, a chronic condition with symptoms including vertigo and tinnitus, and doctors have urged him to take a break from touring or risk losing his hearing for good.

“Two and a half months ago, just before a show in Dallas, I lost most of my hearing,” he posted on Facebook. “Although I can still hear a little, one on one, and on the phone, I can’t hear music well enough to sing.

“The lower frequencies distort violently making it impossible to find pitch. I’ve been to the House Ear Institute, the Stanford Ear Institute, and the Mayo Clinic, hoping to find an answer. The doctors believe I have Meniere’s disease and have agreed that I can’t perform until I improve.

“Therefore the only prudent thing to do is to cancel all future shows. Needless to say, I feel horrible about this, and wish to sincerely apologize to all the fans who’ve already bought tickets and were planning to come see us. I’m going to concentrate on getting better, and hope that one day soon I’ll be able to perform again.”

Upon hearing the news, Ryan Adams — a fellow Meniere’s sufferer — reached out to Lewis to wish him well in his recovery.

“Good sir, you hang in there,” he tweets. “Menieres is a tough ride at first. It’s confusing & hard to explain to others, as they cannot see it. BUT you will rise above it and be better than ever.”

Categories
Movies

I thought the ice storm we were having would knock out the power at the cinema and so I didn’t go see anything. It didn’t. My loss.

Dwayne Johnson powers Rampage past A Quiet Place at the box office

After a slow start Friday, Dwayne Johnson and a giant gorilla are poised to top the box office this weekend.

The action hero’s new disaster movie Rampage will debut with an estimated $34.5 million from 4,101 theaters in the U.S. and Canada through Sunday, edging out last week’s No. 1 title, A Quiet Place, while the horror flick Truth or Dare opens in third.

Despite taking the crown, Rampage is coming in on the low end of industry projections, which had it pegged in the $35 million-$40 million range. The New Line and Warner Bros. film, which reportedly cost about $120 million to make, is off to a solid start overseas, where it will gross an estimated $114.1 million this weekend.

Based on the classic arcade game about giant monsters laying waste to cities, Rampage stars Johnson as a primatologist and former soldier who gets caught up in a rogue experiment that mutates an albino gorilla he saved from poachers — as well as a wolf and a crocodile. The movie failed to impress critics but garnered an A-minus CinemaScore, suggesting decent word-of-mouth prospects.

Rampage will need to demonstrate staying power, like Johnson’s recent hit Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and/or do big business internationally to be considered a success.

In second place, Paramount’s thriller A Quiet Place will take in about $32.6 million, which represents a very modest 35% decline from its excellent opening last week. That figure brings the movie’s domestic total to about $100 million after 10 days in theaters. The film has added about $51.7 million from foreign markets.

Directed by John Krasinski, who also stars alongside wife Emily Blunt, A Quiet Place follows a family living in silence in order to hide from creatures that hunt their prey by sound.

Also scaring up ticket sales this weekend is Universal and Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare, which will gross about $19.1 million from 3,029 North American figures. That’s an impressive number for a movie that reportedly cost about $3.5 million to make and was shredded by critics. Audiences gave it a B-minus CinemaScore.

Rounding out the top five are Steven Spielberg and Warner Bros’. sci-fi adventure Ready Player One, with about $11.2 million in its third weekend, and Universal’s R-rated comedy Blockers, with about $10.3 million in its second weekend.

Fox Searchlight also expanded Wes Anderson’s stop-motion movie Isle of Dogs to 1,939 theaters (up from 554), collecting an estimated $5 million (good for seventh place) and upping its domestic total to about $18.5 million.

According to ComScore, overall box office is down 2.3 percent year-to-date. Check out the April 13-15 figures below.

1. Rampage — $34.5 million
2. A Quiet Place — $32.6 million
3. Truth or Dare — $19.1 million
4. Ready Player One — $11.2 million
5. Blockers — $10.3 million
6. Black Panther — $5.3 million
7. Isle of Dogs — $5 million
8. I Can Only Imagine — $3.8 million
9. Acrimony — $3.7 million
10. Chappaquiddick — $3 million

Categories
People

He Was A Great Actor. May He Rest In Peace.

R. Lee Ermey, Golden Globe Nominee for ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ Dies at 74

The news was announced via his official Twitter account by his longtime manager.
R. Lee Ermey, a Golden Globe-nominated actor best known for his role as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, has died.

Ermey, whose nickname was “The Gunny,” died Sunday morning from complications of pneumonia. He was 74.

The news was announced via his official twitter account by his longtime manager, Bill Rogin, who wrote: “It is with deep sadness that I regret to inform you all that R. Lee Ermey (“The Gunny”) passed away this morning from complications of pneumonia. He will be greatly missed by all of us. Semper Fi, Gunny. Godspeed.”

Ermey not only played a member of the military in the movies, but he also was one in real life, having been a U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant and an honorary gunnery sergeant. He also served as a drill instructor for the Marines. Ermey also served 14 months in Vietnam and completed two tours in Okinawa, Japan.

Both March 24, 1944, in Emporia, Kan., Ermey’s family moved to Toppenish, Wash., when he was 14. There, he became a “troublemaker and a bit of a hell-raiser,” he told the Civilian Marksmanship Program’s online magazine in September 2010, and he found himself in court multiple times.

“Basically, a silver-haired judge, a kindly old judge, looked down at me and said, ‘This is the second time I’ve seen you up here and it looks like we’re going to have to do something about this,” he told CMP. “He gave me a choice. He said I could either go into the military — any branch I wanted to go to — or he was going to send me where the sun never shines. And I love sunshine, I don’t know about you.”

After retiring from the military with 11 years of service under his belt, Ermey took some acting classes and was cast in one of his first roles, playing a helicopter pilot in 1979’s Apocalypse Now, and also serving as a technical adviser to director Francis Ford Coppola on the film. Another role he landed around that same time also hit close to home, playing a Marine drill instructor in Sidney Furie’s The Boys in Company C.

But it was his role role in Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket that brought him household recognition and critical acclaim; in addition to his Golden Globe nom, he also earned a best supporting actor award from the Boston Society of Film Critics. He’s probably best remembered for the numerous memorable lines he delivered as the no-nonsense sergeant: including: “What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn’t mommy and daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?” and “I want that head so sanitary and squared away that the Virgin Mary herself would be proud to go in there and take a dump.”

The story goes that Ermey was originally hired to advise and train the actor who would play the role, but Kubrick was so impressed by what he saw, he offered Ermey the role.

He played a similar character in The Frighteners, which was directed by Peter Jackson and starred Michael J. Fox.

But he has said he’s not really like those characters. “I’m basically a nice person,” he told the Spokesman Review in 2010.

Other films credits include Mississippi Burning, Prefontaine, the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Fletch Lives and Se7en. He also had a healthy voice-over career, playing the lead of the green plastic Army solders in the Toy Story films along with a role in SpongeBob SquarePants, among others, along with voice roles in multiple video games.

Ermy got a chance to showcase his comedy chops in 2001’s Saving Silverman, which he starred in alongside Jason Biggs, Steve Zahn, Jack Black and Amanda Peet.

Ermey also was one of the rare conservatives in more liberal Hollywood. In 2010, he did a commercial for Geico but later said he was fired from that gig after bashing then-President Obama at a Toys 4 Tots benefit. At the time, he said that Obama’s administration was “destroying the country” and “driving us into bankruptcy so that they can impose socialism on us.” He apologized, but two years later, he told TMZ he was fired by Geico over those remarks: “If you’re a conservative in this town, you better watch out.”

As he told the Spokesman Review in his 2010 interview: “I don’t have anything in common with Hollyweird.”

More recently, Ermey hosted Outdoor Channel’s GunnyTime With R. Lee Ermey.

Categories
People

So glad he’s okay!!

Will Ferrell Out Of Hospital After SUV Flips In California Freeway Crash

Will Ferrell has been released from a hospital and said to be doing fine following a two-car freeway crash late Thursday south of Los Angeles.

Ferrell was riding in a chauffeur-driven SUV with two other people when they were hit by another vehicle whose driver had fallen asleep at the wheel, Ferrell’s manager told Deadline.

The accident occurred shortly before 11 PM on northbound Interstate 5 in Mission Viejo in Orange County, according to California Highway Patrol Sgt. Richard Peacock. Ferrell’s vehicle, which was in the HOV lane, was struck by a vehicle on the right that had veered into the HOV lane. Ferrell’s vehicle then hit the center divider and overturned, Peacock said.

Ferrell and the three other people in the vehicle were all taken to a hospital. The actor was released a short time ago and is said to be doing well. A female passenger had “major injuries,” according to Peacock. The other two suffered minor injuries. The driver of the other vehicle was not hurt and was not detained or ticketed, he said.

TMZ, which first reported the crash, posted video of Ferrell being loaded into the ambulance.

The actor reportedly was on his way back from a Funny or Die event near San Diego.

Categories
Television

I admit that I love them more together than I do apart. Apart they’re still funny but not as funny. I don’t like this news!!

‘Broad City’ To End After Season 5, Ilana Glazer & Abbi Jacobson Ink First-Look Deal With Comedy Central

One of Comedy Central’s signature comedy series, Broad City, will be coming to an end after its upcoming fifth season, set to air in early 2019.

Comedy Central is staying in business with Broad City creators, showrunners, directors and stars Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, who have signed a development deal with the network. Under the pact, Comedy Central will have a first look at all content created and/or developed for television by Glazer and Jacobson, both together and independently. The deal also extends across all of parent company Viacom’s television networks.

Glazer and Jacobson have three projects already in development at Comedy Central under the new pact: Mall Town USA, Platinum Status and Young Professionals. (The pact excludes existing projects, including Jacobson’s A League of the Their Own reboot series, in works at Amazon.)

Broad City is in the middle of a two-season renewal for Seasons 4 and 5 it received in early 2016 ahead of its Season 3 premiere.

“Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana may appear to be aimless and full of hair-brained schemes, but Abbi and Ilana IRL have proven to be stellar creator/writer/performer/director/producers,” said Kent Alterman, President of Comedy Central. “Their supreme focus on telling new stories, in new worlds, with new talent is nearly scary.”

He told Deadline that it was Glazer and Jacobson’s decision to end the show. “It’s purely driven by creative storytelling. They came to us and said, ‘We think that we need to figure out how to resolve a final season.’ They have great ideas about how they want to end it, and the last thing we want to do is to have someone not end something on their terms.”

Alterman would not reveal details about Season 5 as they are still being formulated but said that the duo’s “plans for winding the series up are really exciting. I think it’s going to be a great celebration of this show.”

Said Glazer and Jacobson, “Broad City has been our baby and first love for almost 10 years, since we started as a web series. It’s been a phenomenal experience, and we’ve put ourselves into it completely. Broad City’s always had a spontaneous pace and feeling, and ending after season five honors that spirit. We are very excited to bring new voices and points of view to Comedy Central and continue our collaboration together in new ways.”

The deal with Glazer and Jacobson is a coup for Comedy Central which has seen a number of creators and stars who established themselves on the Viacom network leave for new shows elsewhere, most recently The Daily Show‘s Hasan Minhaj and Michelle Wolf, who will headline their own talkers for Netflix, and previously Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Samantha Bee. “We are working in a very supportive environment; it’s a very different environment now at Viacom, being less siloed, and that helps,” Alterman said before adding in his signature deadpan style, “We are still trying to overcome the bad feelings that we only got 16+ years with Jon Stewart and 20 with Stephen Colbert because runs are usually longer than that but we are doing the best we can.”

Broad City has been one of two hit Comedy Central primetime series created by and starring women, along with sketch comedy Inside Amy Schumer, which is on indefinite hiatus as Schumer focuses on features. There has been no change in the show’s status but Schumer’s open invitation to return stands. “If she decides she wants to refocus her energy in the sketch arena, we’re ready to go,” Alterman said.

Created by Broad City producer Gabe Liedman, Mall Town USA is an animated comedy that follows the afterschool misadventures of a 13-year-old girl navigating the complexities of puberty and society in the classic microcosm of American culture that is The Mall. Jacobson and Glazer executive produce.

Written by and starring Eliot Glazer (Ilana Glazer’s brother), Platinum Status is set in the hipster-heavy east side of Los Angeles and tells the story of professional back-up singer Noah (Glazer), a gay guy who’s always felt left out of the “community.” And after he’s dumped by his boyfriend of ten years, Noah rebounds in the least likely way: by hooking up with a girl. With help from his friends Kevin and Mimi and guidance from his kinda-sorta-girlfriend Alexa, Noah tries to evolve both in the bedroom and the recording studio. Eliot Glazer will write and executive produce and Ilana Glazer will also executive produce along with Principato Young’s Peter Principato and Brian Steinberg and Electric Avenue’s Will Arnett and Marc Forman.

The third project, Young Professionals centers on David Litt, who at age 24 became one of the youngest White House speechwriters in history. Written and executive produced by Litt and inspired by his own experiences, Young Professionals follows five friends who struggle to make a difference in the broken, bizarre, hopelessly absurd world of Washington, D.C. Jacobson and Glazer also serve as executive producers.

Categories
SCTV

Awesome! Awesome!! Awesome!!! An SCTV Reunion!!!

Martin Scorsese to Direct SCTV Reunion Documentary for Netflix

Jimmy Kimmel will host ‘An Afternoon with SCTV’ in May in Toronto to feature in a comedy special.
Netflix has ordered an untitled SCTV reunion special featuring one of entertainment’s most versatile sketch comedy troupes, with Martin Scorsese to direct.

Scorsese will reunite former SCTV co-stars Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short and Dave Thomas in front of a live audience for An Afternoon with SCTV on May 13 in Toronto, to be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.

The reunion will anchor the documentary about the cult TV spinoff of Canada’s Second City to be shot over three days next month in Toronto, with Andrew Alexander, John Brunton and Lindsay Cox producing.

Scorsese, with 12 Oscar nominations and a directing win for The Departed (2006), held long conversations with SCTV alum about their character-driven TV satire series that ran from 1976 to 1984 as he developed his documentary about the famed comedy troupe, most of whom were Canadian artists.

These included Levy as smarmy comic Bobby Bittman and broadcaster Earl Camembert, the late John Candy as smooth-talking Johnny LaRue, the late Harold Ramis as game show host Moe Green, Martin as leopard-clad programming boss Edith Prickley, O’Hara as platinum blonde singer Lola Heatherton, Dave Thomas as drama critic Bill Needles, Rick Moranis as one of the 5 Neat Guys and Joe Flaherty as station manager Guy Cabellero.

Canadian-born comic and actor Martin Short brought many of his SCTV characters to his eventual star turn on Saturday Night Live.

Most of the original SCTV cast moved from the Canadian touchstone comedy to successful careers in Hollywood movies and TV shows. SCTV got its start in Toronto in 1976, a year after Saturday Night Live debuted stateside, as a satire of TV programming conveyed as a broadcast day from a low-budget TV station in the fictional town of Melonville, with backstage machinations included.

The latest SCTV reunion follows Moranis and Thomas, who played SCTV’s and SNL’s beer-loving McKenzie brothers during the 1980s, last year reuniting for a Toronto benefit concert. Other Canadian comedy legends on The Second City concert bill included Ghostbusters star Dan Aykroyd and O’Hara, Levy, Martin Short and Flaherty.

The satirical series continued on air to 1984, before being syndicated across North America. SCTV alum Levy and O’Hara co-star in the Canadian-made comedy Schitt’s Creek for Pop stateside, and the duo have appeared in films like Waiting for Guffman, For Your Consideration, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind.

Categories
Books

Got my copy today! Can’t wait to read it!!

Everything you need to know about The Never-Ending Present, the new Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip biography

Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip hung with Robert Plant, shot pool with the Rolling Stones and played pick-up hockey against a pair of illustrious Toronto Maple Leafs. The Hip was fond of marijuana. The band’s manager once told guitarist Rob Baker not to wear short sleeves on stage because he had “arms like ham.” And not everyone in Canada thought “Canada’s band” was all that great when it came to musical abilities.

These are some of the things we learn from The Never-Ending Present, a new biography on Downie and the Tragically Hip that offers contextual documentation of the band’s oeuvre, insight into the Hip’s inner-workings and enough sprinkles of backstage stories to keep things perky.

Released on April 3 and published by ECW Press, the book is written by music journalist Michael Barclay, who previously co-authored 2001’s Have Not Been The Same: The CanRock Renaissance, a landmark text on the emergence of this country’s alt-rock scene in the 1980s and ‘90s.

The Never-Ending Present takes its name from a song on Downie’s first solo album, Coke Machine Glow. To author Barclay, the title represents the band’s ethos: That the most important moment is the one at hand.

“I was writing this book while its subject was living with terminal cancer, a liminal state where one has no choice but to live day to day, which Gord Downie did until his final days, writing and creating and advocating as much as he could – as he always had in the never-ending present,” Barclay explains in a press release.

Downie, who posthumously won three Juno Awards in Vancouver last weekend (including one for artist of the year), died on Oct. 17, 2017, at the age of 53. Chapters of The Never-Ending Present are given over to the prolific final months of Downie’s life and career, including his cancer diagnosis and treatment, the final tour with the Hip and the activism attached to Secret Path, a concept album about an Indigenous youth who died in 1966 while fleeing a residential school in Northern Ontario.

Many of the book’s 482 pages document the band’s most remembered albums, including background tidbits that promise to be catnip to Hip fanatics. For example, the revelation that the making of the 1994 LP Day for Night was a real dope fest. “I think they smoked a quarter-pound of weed for the recording,” the album’s producer Mark Howard told the author. “And then when we mixed it, it was a half-pound of hash.”

Apparently, Led Zeppelin singer Plant loved that album. He also played with guitarist Rob Baker’s newborn son backstage when the Hip toured with Plant and Jimmy Page. Someone who wasn’t a fan of Day for Night was one of the band’s managers, Allan Gregg. Hearing the record for the first time, he thought it was unlistenable and unfinished. The band disagreed, and showed Gregg the door: “We think it might be better to have you as a friend than as a manager.”

The book is unauthorized, in that members of the Hip – or relatives or current management – did not participate in the process of putting it together. Barclay instead interviewed other musicians and associates, and drew on quotes from other sources.

One of the more productive interview subjects is former manager Jake Gold (the one who told guitarist Baker to cover his “ham” arms onstage). Gold provides illumination into the machinations of the record business, while offering colourful anecdotes as well. Among others: When the Hip opened for the Rolling Stones in Europe in 1995, Mick Jagger and the others watched the band from side stage. “Afterward,” recalls Gold, “each one of [the Stones] came up to the band and said, ‘Way to go! You guys are the real deal, real rock ‘n’ roll guys.’”

From then on, Hip members were welcome backstage, where they shot pool with Keith Richards. No mention if they let him win.

Other than a sentence about Downie’s divorce from his wife (and mother to his four children), the personal lives of the band members are not part of the narrative. The singer’s passion for hockey is noted, though. For a summer game in Kingston with former Leafs Wendel Clark and Kirk Muller, Downie drove in from Toronto and slept in his car so he wouldn’t be late to the game. He played goaltender; Muller told Clark to hold back on his wrist shots: “If this guy takes one in the throat, there goes the band.”

Since he doesn’t talk to the Hip themselves, Barclay doesn’t get deep into the tensions involved within a band described by an anonymous colleague as “Gord and the Kingston 4.” It is divulged that early in the Hip’s career, Downie stipulated that he would be the group’s lone lyricist.

Although he argues against the notion that the band wasn’t musically gifted, Barclay isn’t afraid to present the suggestion. One unnamed person contacted by the author for his thoughts on the Hip politely declined to contribute to the book: “I actually think they are mostly terrible and remain shocked that people love them so much,” reads an e-mail to the author, presented in a chapter subtitled “Band of Ringos.”

The book ends with a scene at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square, where a tribute concert happened one week after Downie died. “There was no Gord Downie here, no Tragically Hip,” writes Barclay. “There never would be again.”

Not so fast. “That wasn’t the end,” Patrick Downie told reporters recently after accepting Juno awards for his brother’s 2017 solo album Introduce Yerself. “[Gord] did a lot of music in his final time.”

The never-ending present, then. A coda calls.

Categories
Television

I hope they also decide to remake King Of Kensington!!

New episodes of ’Street Legal’ in development

TORONTO — Over 20 years after it ended, a reboot of the Canadian courtroom drama “Street Legal” is on the horizon.

The CBC tells The Canadian Press it is in development on six new episodes of the series with Bernie Zuckerman, president of Indian Grove Productions.

The public broadcaster says original cast member Cynthia Dale is attached.

It adds that “no further details are confirmed at this point.”

The popular Gemini Award-winning series aired from 1987 to 1994 and followed a group of lawyers at a firm in Toronto.

Storylines focused not just on their cases but also on their personal lives, adding a soapy quality.

Dale played aggressive lawyer Olivia Novak in a cast that also included Eric Peterson, Sonja Smits, C. David Johnson, and Albert Schultz, among others.

The show was shot in Toronto and had a saxophone-heavy theme song and many guest appearances.

Dale, Peterson, Smits, and Johnson are all theatre stars whose careers have continued to thrive after “Street Legal.”

Dale has had a longtime presence at the Stratford Festival and other theatres, as well as a singing career and appearances on series including “Working the Engels.”

Peterson has racked up scores of onscreen credits, most notably his role as grouchy dad Oscar Leroy on the Canadian series “Corner Gas” and its new animated version.

Smits left “Street Legal” in 1992 to pursue other projects and spend more time with her family. She went on to star in “Traders” and has recently appeared on “Mary Kills People.”

Johnson’s recent credits include the series “The Blacklist” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

And Schultz went on to become the founding artistic director of Soulpepper Theatre Company in Toronto. He recently resigned, after four actresses filed separate lawsuits against him and the company, alleging sexual misconduct. None of their allegations have been tested in court.

Other series from Indian Grove Productions include “Remedy” and “King.”