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.”

Categories
People

Get well soon, Kenny!!

Kenny Rogers ends farewell tour early due to ‘a series of health challenges’

Country music veteran Kenny Rogers has pulled the remaining 2018 dates of his farewell trek as he battles “a series of health challenges”.

The retiring singer initially cancelled concerts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania set for May, but now the 79-year-old has been advised by doctors to officially end The Gambler’s Last Deal Tour early.

As a result, Rogers has axed the last few dates on his calendar, including June stops in Rhode Island, and New York City, as well as his only U.K. show – his final performance – at the Livewire Festival in August.

“Kenny Rogers has been working through a series of health challenges,” his publicist shares in a statement issued to People.com. “His doctors fully expect the outcome to be great, but they have advised him to cancel all performances through the end of the year to focus on recuperation.”

“I didn’t want to take forever to retire,” Rogers adds. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to say farewell to the fans over the course of the past two years on The Gambler’s Last Deal Tour.

“I could never properly thank them for the encouragement and support they’ve given me throughout my career and the happiness I’ve experienced as a result of that.”

The Islands In the Stream hitmaker announced plans to hang up the microphone in 2015, and in October , he was honoured by his peers, friends, and a host of young stars at the All in for the Gambler: Kenny Rogers’ Farewell Concert Celebration tribute in Nashville, Tennessee. Performers included Lionel Richie and Dolly Parton.

Categories
Concerts

I’d go for free, but I wouldn’t pay.

Drake Performing Intimate Dinner Concert In Toronto

Drake’s transition into a 1960s crooner has begun as he’s set to partake in a VIP dinner theatre-style concert series in Toronto later this spring.

Chateau Le Jardin in Vaughan will serve as the venue for the ultra-exclusive concert series where Drake will be performing some of his more family-friendly songs for dinner goers.

Only about 1,000 people will get the chance to see Drake belt out soulful, dinner-appropriate renditions of “Hold On, We’re Going Home”, all part of the Après Noir series going down at Le Jardin.

Getting tickets for this event won’t be easy, though, as priority is being given to Le Jardin members.

Prices haven’t been announced yet but you can bet tickets to see Drake wearing a tux and singing “Find Your Love” won’t come cheap.

It’s worth noting that fellow Torontonian Jessie Reyez will be on hand to help Drake out with “Take Care” for the concert on June 7.

Categories
Movies

I finally get to see READY PLAYER ONE on Monday!! Tomorrow!!!

Weekend Box Office: ‘Ready Player One’ Wins Easter Egg Hunt With $53M

The sci-fi adventure marks director Steven Spielberg’s biggest opening in a decade; Tyler Perry’s ‘Acrimony’ places No. 2 with $17M, while ‘God’s Not Dead 3′ falters at the alter.

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One — his self-proclaimed return to popcorn fare — easily won the box-office Easter egg hunt, grossing $41.2 million to score the holiday weekend’s biggest opening ever for a non-sequel.

That brings the movie’s four-day bow to a better-than-expected $53.2 million after launching a day early on Thursday. Still, the verdict is out on whether Ready One Player is a victory, considering its hefty production budget of at least $175 million, before marketing. It fared far better than Pacific Rim Uprising or Tomb Raider, but overall March revenue was still down 24 percent from a year ago, while the first quarter ended down by nearly 4 percent, according to comScore.

Overseas, the male-skewing film opened to $128 million — fueled by $61.7 million from China — for a global debut of $181.2 million. It is the biggest China launch in Warner Bros.’ history, surpassing Batman v. Justice: Dawn of Justice ($57 million).

The sci-fi adventure also marks Spielberg’s biggest domestic bow since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ($100.1 million) a decade ago, helping to ease the sting of his big-budget family film The BFG, which failed to resonate with audiences in summer 2016, opening to only $18.8 million.

Ready Player One secured the second-best opening of the year so far behind Black Panther. It’s also the best number for an original film from Spielberg since Jurassic Park ($47 million) in 1993, not adjusted for inflation.

Eager to be in business with Spielberg and possibly birth a new franchise, Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures partnered on Ready Player One, which was based on Ernest Cline’s pop-culture-laced novel about a teen’s quest to win control over a virtual universe. The pic is infused with references to the 1980s, including numerous nods to popular movies (including a few from Spielberg himself).

“Spielberg is an extraordinary filmmaker and he really geeks out on this stuff. I don’t know anyone else who could have made this movie,” says Warners domestic distribution chief Jeff Goldstein. “Ready Player One’s opening beat expectations and now it’s all about playability. It is definitely eyed as something that could have sequel opportunities. The discussion was always, ‘Let’s see how the first one does.'”

Ready Player One — which had a major presence at the recent SXSW Film Festival –— came in ahead of other comparable films, including the pricey miss Ender’s Game, which opened to $27.1 million in 2013. Between 61 percent and 65 percent of ticket buyers were male. Imax theaters turned in an impressive $6.6 million in North America.

Ready Player One stars Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts, a young man who gets caught up in the virtual-reality game known as the OASIS, which was created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance). Watts and his friends are determined to find the Easter egg that will give them control of OASIS. Spielberg directed from an adapted script by Zak Penn and Cline. Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T.J. Miller and Simon Pegg also star.

Tyler Perry and Lionsgate’s latest film together, the marital psychological thriller Acrimony, bowed at No. 2 over the weekend with a solid $17.1 million from 2,006 theaters. Taraji P. Henson stars in the film as a wife determined to exact revenge on her cheating husband. Lyriq Bent, Jazmyn Simon and Crystle Stewart co-star. Nearly three-quarters of ticket buyers were female.

Acrimony, Ready Player One and Easter weekend’s third new movie, God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, all earned A- CinemaScores.

That grade, however, didn’t appear to help God’s Not Dead 3, which opened at a distant No. 12 with roughly $2.6 million from 1,693 theaters. (It was even topped by Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, which is playing in only 165 locations.) The first God’s Not Dead (2014) debuted to $9.2 million, while its 2016 follow-up started off with $7.6 million.

Instead, faith-based moviegoers continued to embrace I Can Only Imagine, which placed No. 4 in its third weekend with $10.8 million from 2,648 theaters for a domestic total of $55.6 million — surpassing Manchester by the Sea ($47.7 million) to become the top-grossing title in Roadside’s history, not adjusting for inflation. The distributor added 395 theaters to the film’s run over Easter weekend.

Sony’s faith-based title Paul, Apostle of Christ has also faltered in the face of I Can Only Imagine. The former pic came in No. 10 in its second outing with an estimated $3.5 million for a domestic cume of $11.5 million.

Among other holdovers, Disney and Marvel’s Black Panther remained a powerful force in its seventh weekend, coming in No. 3 with an $11.2 million for a domestic cume of $650.7 million and a global tally of $1.273 million. It has passed fellow Disney title Beauty and the Beast ($1.264 million) at the worldwide box office and is on the verge of eclipsing Jurassic World ($652 million) domestically to rank No. 4 on the all-time list, not adjusted for inflation.

Pacific Rim Uprising wasn’t so lucky. The event film tumbled 67 percent in its sophomore weekend to $9.2 million for a 10-day North American cume of $45.7 million. The sequel, from Legendary and Universal, is a far bigger play internationally, where it earned another $31.4 million for a foreign tally of $186.2 million, including $89.6 million from China, and $231.9 million worldwide.

Uprising wasn’t Universal’s only offshore effort, as the studio opened Blockers in five markets a week before the movie’s domestic bow. The comedy earned $5 million abroad, led by the U.K. ($1.9 million).

Sony’s family film Peter Rabbit jumped the $200 million mark globally — in North America, it’s the No. 2 pic of the year behind Black Panther with $110.6 million in ticket sales — as it expanded into additional markets. It continues to do huge business in the U.K., where it came beat Ready Player One to finish Sunday with $30.9 million in ticket sales.

At the U.S. specialty box office, Isle of Dogs earned $2.8 million for a theater average of $17,030, the best average of the weekend. The Fox Searchlight film added more than 144 runs in its second weekend.

And Aaron Katz’s Gemini opened in four theaters, earning $34,184 for a theater average of $8,546. Zoe Kravitz stars in the mystery, which had its world premiere at SXSW.

Categories
People

Very sad news. I have loved his work my whole life. Rest In Peace, Steven Bochco.

Steven Bochco, Creative Force Behind ‘Hill Street Blues,’ ‘L.A. Law’ and ‘NYPD Blue,’ Dies at 74

The unwavering TV writer-producer, winner of 10 Emmys, butted heads with networks and almost always won.
Steven Bochco, the strong-willed writer and producer who brought gritty realism and sprawling ensemble casts to the small screen with such iconic series as Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue, has died, a source told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 74.

No details of his death were immediately available. Suffering with leukemia, he received a stem cell transplant from an anonymous 23-year-old in late 2014. In May 2016, he met the man that prolonged his life.

The 10-time Primetime Emmy Award winner also was behind the Neil Patrick Harris ABC comedy-drama Doogie Howser, M.D. and the TNT drama Murder in the First.

A New York City native who began at Universal Studios in the mid-1960s, Bochco time and time again refused to bend to network chiefs or standards and practices execs, thus earning rare creative control during his five decades of envelope-pushing work.

In a 2002 interview for the Archive of American Television, Bochco explained how he and Michael Kozoll, both working for MTM Enterprises, came to Hill Street Blues, which debuted on last-place NBC in January 1981 and amassed 98 Emmy Awards during its remarkable 146-episode run.

“We agreed that we would do it, on one condition, which we assumed would kill the deal right there,” he said. “I said to [NBC entertainment exec] Brandon [Tartikoff], ‘We’ll do this pilot for you on the condition that you leave us completely alone to do whatever we want.’ And he said OK.

“I began to hear words about myself: He’s arrogant, he’s this, he’s that. My attitude was, call me what you will, but I know I have a great project here. I don’t know how many great projects there are going to be in my life, and I’m not going to screw this one up. I’d rather not do it. And they folded. They virtually folded on everything.”

In 1987, CBS legend William S. Paley offered Bochco, then 44, the job of president of the network’s entertainment division. He turned that down to sign an unprecedented six-year, 10-series deal worth in the neighborhood of $10 million at ABC, which had just ended its contract with another legendary producer, Aaron Spelling. The pact gave Bochco ownership of the series he developed.

As Hill Street was winding down without him after he was fired at MTM, Bochco jumped into the legal world with a new deal at 20th Century Fox and created (with Terry Louise Fisher) the stylish NBC smash L.A. Law, which ran from 1986-94.

And with fellow Hill Street scribe David Milch, he came up with ABC’s controversial NYPD Blue, which aimed to compete with the risque kind of shows that were siphoning audiences from broadcast to cable. That series, the longest-running one-hour drama in ABC history until surpassed by Grey’s Anatony, aired from 1993-2005.

Bochco, though, was not without his misfires. They included NBC’s Bay City Blues, a 1983 drama about a minor-league baseball team that lasted four episodes; CBS’ Public Morals, a vice squad-set comedy that got canned after one episode in October 1996; and ABC’s infamous Cop Rock, which incongruously combined police drama and show-stopping Broadway-style singing and dancing and lasted a scant 11 episodes in 1990.

The best Bochco series included large ensemble casts and parallel storylines that pushed the hot button social issues of the day. In an interview with Pamela Douglas for the 2007 book Writing the TV Drama Series: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV, Bochco explained how he pulled it all together:

“When you end up creating a show with seven, eight, nine characters — ask yourself, how can you appropriately dramatize that many characters within the framework of an hour television show? And the answer is that you can’t. So you say, OK, what we have to do is spill over the sides of our form and start telling multi-plot, more serial kinds of stories.

“Even though any given character may not have but three scenes in an hour, those three scenes are part of a 15-scene storyline that runs over numerous episodes. So that was simply a matter of trying to react to the initial things we did. The show began to dictate what it needed to be. Probably the smartest thing Michael and I did was to let it take us there instead of trying to hack away to get back into the box. We just let it spill over.”

Bochco also created the short-lived CBS police drama Paris, which starred James Earl Jones. And his landmark ABC series Murder One followed a complicated investigation during the course of a 23-episode season — much like The Killing or True Detective would years later.

Bochco was born in New York City on Dec. 16, 1943. His father, Rudolph, was a violinist, his mother, Mimi, a painter and jewelry designer. He attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan to pursue singing, attended NYU for a year and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he left with a theater degree in 1966.

He received a fellowship from MCA to help him pay for school, and through that, landed work at Universal during the summers before he was a junior and senior. He knew he would have a job at Universal when he finished college, and he drove across the country with classmate (and future L.A. Law player) Michael Tucker to Hollywood.

“Universal had dozens of hours of television that they were churning out. Inevitably, they started steering me toward writing for television,” Bochco said in his TV Archive interview.

His first writing credit came when he expanded an already filmed one-hour drama into two hours. He did that by adding backstory about the characters when they were kids.

“I was so naive about the business that it didn’t even occur to me that my name would be up on the screen,” he said. “Suddenly when this thing was finished and I went to see it, it said, ‘Written by Rod Serling and Steven Bochco.’ That was my first professional writing credit.”

He worked on Columbo for a few seasons; the first 90-minute episode he wrote was 1971’s “Murder by the Book,” directed by Steven Spielberg, and Bochco received his first of his 34 Emmy noms.

Bochco later wrote and produced a 1972 ABC movie of the week, Lieutenant Shuster’s Wife, which starred Lee Grant; co-created his first series, NBC’s The Bold Ones: The New Doctors, starring E.G. Marshall as a neurosurgeon; and wrote for NBC’s McMillan & Wife and the CBS cop drama Delvecchio, starring Judd Hirsch and future Hill Street roll-call cop Michael Conrad (“Let’s be careful out there”).

In 1976, Bochco left Universal after 12 years for Grant Tinker’s MTM. Hill Street was championed by NBC’s Fred Silverman, who wanted a series along the lines of the 1981 Paul Newman film Fort Apache, the Bronx, about the personal lives of cops.

“Here are these cops who are trying to keep the lid on 10 pounds of crap in a nine-pound can,” Bochco said in describing the series. “That created the incredible push/pull tension of that series. … We stuck intensely powerful melodrama side by side with slapstick farcical, fall-down clowning. It was absurd, and it worked.”

Hill Street was the lowest-rated show to be picked up for the following season, 87th among the 96 series in the Nielsen ratings. The show won eight Emmys out of 21 noms in its first try and eventually moved to Thursday nights, where it would establish NBC as a powerhouse.

After the fifth season of Hill Street in 1985, Bochco was fired from MTM (after Tinker left to run NBC) when he refused to cut costs and pare storylines. (The show nabbed the best drama series Emmy in each of his five seasons and did not win again after he left.) An extremely motivated Bochco then signed a three-year deal with Fox and went about creating L.A. Law, with Fisher, a lawyer and novelist, providing the legal expertise.

“To me, Los Angeles was the absolute antithesis of that fictional city in which Hill Street Blues took place,” Bochco said. “I wanted [L.A. Law] to be the polar opposite thematically. One show at its core was about despair and the inevitable failure of a kind of system. At the other end, I got L.A. and the land of dreams and wealthy, young, upwardly mobile attorneys who drive Porsches. It’s the same legal system, yet these people are masters of the universe.”

L.A. Law, which took Hill Street’s 10 p.m. Thursday slot, amassed 15 Emmys, including four for outstanding drama series.

Bochco gave David E. Kelley, then a practicing attorney in Boston, his first show business job as a writer, then handed the L.A. Law reins to him when he stepped aside to focus on his ABC deal.

Secure with his ABC pact, Bochco formed Fox-based Steven Bochco Productions and with Kelley created Doogie Howser, about a precocious doctor (Harris) who scored a perfect SAT score at age 6 and graduated medical school at 16. That series lasted four seasons.

When we cast [Harris] he had just turned 16 and he looked like he was like 12,” Bochco said. “He was perfect.”

NYPD Blue was set to debut in fall 1992, but when he and ABC clashed on issues of language and sex, Bochco refused to budge, and its debut was postponed a year.

“There really hadn’t been a one-hour hit [that was started] since L.A. Law in 1986, and here we were in 1991,” he said in the Writing the TV Drama Series book. “The hour drama was in the toilet and that’s my business, so my business was in the toilet.

“I thought the only shot we had at reviving the form is if we were willing to compete with cable television. So that was my pitch to ABC when they wanted a cop show from me. I remember [then network exec] Bob Iger saying, ‘I made a huge deal with you because I wanted another Hill Street Blues and what did I get — a 16-year-old doctor [Doogie] and a bunch of cops [Cop Rock] who sing.’ So I said, ‘I’ll give you the cop show you want, but be careful what you wish for, because the price is this, the language and the nudity.’”

Bochco noted that the “religious right” paid for ads lambasting the show’s sex, language and immorality before NYPD Blue even aired.

“They created a stir that no publicity machine in the world could duplicate,” he recalled. “And thank God they did, because given all the anxiety about the show, if we had faltered a moment in the ratings then, I think we would have been gone in three weeks. But we came out of the shoot huge.”

NYPD Blue went on to win 20 Emmys. (Bochco later sued Fox over the sale of reruns to its sister company FX, saying the “sweetheart deal” deprived him of fair-market value.)

Bochco also was involved in such series as ABC’s Hooperman, starring John Ritter; ABC’s Capitol Critters, an animated show about a mouse in the White House; CBS’ Brooklyn South, another police drama; CBS’ City of Angels, centered on an inner-city hospital; ABC’s Civil Wars, about a law firm specializing in divorce; Over There, an FX drama set during the war in Iraq; and the TNT legal show Raising the Bar.

In 2007, Bochco launched the Internet series Cafe Confidential, with each episode lasting about 60 seconds. Murder in the First, which in its first season examined one crime from commission to trial, debuted in June 2014.

Bochco’s survivors include sister Joanna Frank, who played Sheila Brackman, the wife of Douglas Brackman Jr. (her real-life husband Alan Rachins), on L.A. Law; his wife of 17 years, Dayna; and children Jesse, Jeffrey and Melissa. His first wife was actress Barbara Bosson.

Asked about his producing style in the TV Archive interview, Bochco said his was “not a producing style, it’s a lifestyle.”

He added: “Years and years ago I worked for a producer who taught me more about how not to behave than how to behave. One of the most valuable lessons I ever had. This individual said to me, ‘You get shit on by the people above you, and you shit on the people below you.’ I thought, ‘Hah, there’s a life lesson.’

“I figure if you turn that upside down, you’re on to something. So what you try to do is never shit on the people below you and only shit on the people above you. That always seems to work.”

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Movies

So excited!!!! Can’t wait to watch it!!

Steven Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One’ Gears Up for $42 Million in Four-Day Opening Weekend

“Ready Player One” looks to come out victorious at the box office over the Easter holiday weekend.

Steven Spielberg’s latest film is eyeing $38 million to $42 million over its four-day opening weekend. Given a light weekend of new releases, that number would likely be enough for “Ready Player One” to dominate the domestic box office.

Warner Bros.’ nostalgic fantasy adventure, which currently holds an 82% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, gets an early start on Easter weekend by debuting with Wednesday night previews at 3,500 locations. Starting Thursday, it then expands to 4,200 locations, while launching day and date internationally in 62 markets. Tracking on the film, with a reported budget between $150 million and $175 million, is down slightly from initial estimates of $45 million to $55 million over its four-day opening.

Based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel, “Ready Player One” is set in an elaborate virtual reality world full of pop culture totems from the ’80s. The film, written by Cline and Zak Penn, stars Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, and Mark Rylance. In the year 2045, virtual reality software OASIS is used to engage in work and play. Sheridan’s character, Wade Watts, discovers clues to a hidden game within the program that promises the winner full ownership of the OASIS.

Spielberg most recently helmed political drama “The Post,” which made $165 million worldwide and landed a best picture nod at this year’s Oscars.

Meanwhile, the second weekend of Universal and Legendary’s “Pacific Rim Uprising” will once again battle the tenacious “Black Panther,” as both tentpoles are aiming for $10 million and $15 million at the domestic box office.

Universal and Legendary’s “Pacific Rim Uprising” landed a modest $28 million opening domestically and a much healthier $122.5 million internationally for a worldwide total of $150 million. That’s not to say the seventh weekend of “Black Panther” won’t put up a fair fight. The Marvel film has taken in $631 million to date, making it the fifth highest-grossing movie ever in the U.S. ahead of “The Avengers,” as well as the highest-grossing superhero movie in the U.S., not adjusted for inflation.

Also launching this weekend is Lionsgate’s “Tyler Perry’s Acrimony,” looking to make $7-$11 million in around 2,000 locations. The psychological thriller, produced, written, and directed by Perry, follows Taraji P. Henson as a wife who takes revenge on her unfaithful husband (Lyriq Bent).

The third installment of the “God’s Not Dead” series — “God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness” — is estimated to gross around $5 million at 1,675 locations in its opening weekend. David A. R. White, John Corbett, Shane Harper, Ted McGinley, and Tatum O’Neal make up the ensemble cast portraying a congregation displaced after their church burns down. Easter is always a fertile period for faith-based movies, and the past two weeks saw two recent faith-based films, “I Can Only Imagine” and “Paul, Apostle of Christ.”

In its second weekend, Roadside Attraction and Lionsgate’s “I Can Only Imagine” has been a surprisingly strong performer, earning $38 million. Affirm Films’ “Paul, Apostle of Christ” opened last weekend in line with estimates at $5 million.

Three films — “Baaghi 2,” “Finding Your Feet” and “Gemini” — will have a limited release.

“Baaghi 2,” an Indian action thriller, will open in 125 theaters. The film, featuring Tiger Shroff and Disha Patani, is a remake of 2016’s Telugu movie “Kshanam.” Aimed at the same mature audience that turned out for films like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” Roadside Attractions and Entertainment One’s “Finding Your Feet” stars Imelda Staunton, who seeks refuge in London with her sister when she discovers that her husband of 40 years (John Sessions) is having an affair with her best friend (Josie Lawrence). Neon’s “Gemini” was written and directed by Aaron Katz. The mystery thriller sees Lola Kirke as the assistant of a Hollywood starlet Heather Anderson, played by Zoe Kravitz.