The Targaryens are looking to conquer the summer box office.
“Game of Thrones: Aegon’s Conquest” will hit theaters June 1, 2029, according to Deadline. The movie, written by “House of Cards” showrunner Beau Willimon, will reportedly be directed by Owen Harris. Harris directed three episodes of the “Game of Thrones” spin-off “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.”
Additional details, including the movie’s story, have yet to be revealed. The title hints that the film will follow Aegon the Conqueror, who, along with his sister-wives Visenya and Rhaenys, invaded Westeros and conquered most of the Seven Kingdoms with the help of their dragons, Balerion, Vhagar and Meraxes.
Following his victory, King Aegon I became the first monarch to rule Westeros from the Iron Throne and the founder of the Targaryen dynasty. The conquest took place around 300 years before the events of “Game of Thrones” and is detailed in George R.R. Martin’s book “Fire & Blood.”
“Aegon’s Conquest” would mark the first time the original Aegon is depicted on screen, but the “Game of Thrones” franchise has featured multiple Aegon Targaryens over the years.
Aegon’s descendants revere the Conqueror so highly that he has numerous prominent namesakes. The Targaryen war of succession at the center of “Game of Thrones” prequel series “House of the Dragon” was sparked by the coronation of King Aegon II (portrayed by Tom Glynn-Carney), the younger half brother of the actual heir, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy). Rhaenyra also named one of her children Aegon.
Young Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), one of the central characters in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” is eventually revealed to be the missing prince Aegon Targaryen. Even “Game of Thrones’” beloved Jon Snow (Kit Harrington), believed to be a bastard of House Stark, turned out to actually be a Targaryen named Aegon.
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu and Pop artist Ed Ruscha have a long history of admiring each other’s work. Twenty-four years ago, a nervous Iñárritu visited Ruscha’s Venice studio to offer him the role of the gynecologist in “21 Grams.” They needed a doctor with noble features and blue, believable eyes. That plan didn’t pan out, schedule-wise, but the filmmaker and the artist finally found a way to collaborate.
The result — a Ruscha-designed poster for Iñárritu’s new film “Digger,” starring Tom Cruise — was unveiled Sunday at an intimate brunch at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, attended by Iñárritu, Ruscha and Cruise, as well as “Digger” actors John Goodman, Jesse Plemons, Michael Stuhlbarg and Ross Hatt.
Iñárritu and Cruise laughed as they made a clumsy attempt at a countdown before whipping aside a black velvet curtain to reveal the poster for the first time: a very Ruscha, text-heavy work on a slate gray background with a beige border. A looming ice shelf in the background is surrounded by phrases including, “A Man. A Plan. A Meltdown,” and “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.”
Filmmaker Alejandro Iñárritu and “Digger” star Tom Cruise unveil Ed Ruscha’s new poster for the film. (They just pulled off the black velvet curtain on the floor below.)
(Kevin Garrison)
“Well, the movie blew my hair back,” Ruscha said at the unveiling brunch inside LACMA’s new (still unopened) restaurant, with LACMA Director and Chief Executive Michael Govan by his side. “And not only that, it parted it down the middle. It has since grown back.”
The crowd laughed knowingly. “Digger,” which opens Friday, is a satirical black comedy that follows oil tycoon Digger Rockwell as one of his drilling rigs in Greenland explodes, dislodging an ice shelf that floats away to cause a global disaster. As a dark parable for the dangers of climate change, the film has already proved polarizing, with early reviews coming in mixed.
Ruscha noted that he first saw “Digger” at a screening about six months ago, alongside Govan. “I knew I had seen an epic production, an epic product from an epic producer,” Ruscha said. “So I jumped at the idea of doing the poster. And I thought about it, and I think about this movie, and it reminded me of a kaleidoscope. It’s got so many running-around ideas. It was kaleidoscopic in its message, and its content and its humor.”
Ruscha turned his attention to Iñárritu, “It’s got something to offer to the world, and I thank you for that.”
The filmmaker loved the poster, and the fact that the ice shelf sat front and center.
From left to right — “Digger” actors John Goodman and Jesse Plemons, filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu, artist Ed Ruscha, actor Tom Cruise, LACMA director Michael Govan and actors Ross Hatt and Michael Stuhlbarg — pose with Ruscha’s new poster for the film.
(David Jon)
“The billing is nature: We are human beings, we are in a war against nature,” Iñárritu said — describing what he feels the poster relays — in a phone interview from Mexico City a day before the event. “We think that we are different from nature. So nature, in a way, becomes our enemy. We are fighting a fight against nature, and the enemy is an ice shelf going to Europe. And he just put [that] in the center of it, [like] a disaster movie, which is very clever, as he always is.”
“Those decisions that he made with a very prominent element in a simple way, with one or two words, it just says so much with so little,” Iñárritu continued. “And then he [put] some lines around [it], very Ruscha, that in a way convey the spine or the character itself.”
The director had the same feelings two years ago, at LACMA’s Ruscha retrospective. He said so much with so little, Iñárritu thought, and that “less is more” thinking could hold so much power in a film poster.
Iñárritu, too, has been exhibited at LACMA: earlier this year, with the film installation “Sueño Perro,” a resurrection of lost footage from “Amores Perros;” and in 2017-2018, with the virtual reality installation “CARNE y ARENA,” which explored the human condition of immigrants and refugees.
The director’s collaboration with Ruscha is proof of concept for LACMA’s annual Art + Film gala, entering its 15th year, which seeks to highlight and strengthen the connections between film and visual art by bringing the two communities together at a splashy party — often creating lasting connections between the two groups.
Both Ruscha and Iñárritu have been honored at the gala, the former in 2012 (with Stanley Kubrick) and the latter in 2015 (with James Turrell). “This is a beautiful encounter of art and film,” Govan said at the unveiling.
“Digger” has evolved over nine years, Iñárritu said. It’s been a long journey of taking note of current events, including where the world is going, as well as people’s obsessions and fears.
“The film is a love letter for the young generation,” Iñárritu said. “I think it’s kind of a warning, or a wake-up call. But you can have fun about it, because it’s the only way to — humor allows us to have space and recognize ourselves in that absurdity. So I feel that it’s a human, urgent, now film.”
“Heartwarming” is a cliche of theater reviewing that I have studiously tried to avoid, but I’m tempted to use the word in my review of “Begin Again,” the new musical based on the 2013 John Carney romantic comedy about two dreamers trying to rekindle the love of making music that the industry nearly destroyed.
The show, which is having its world premiere at the Old Globe’s Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage, is just so damn heartwarming that I can’t help but resort to the language of blurbs. But let the ticket buyer beware: Heartwarming is a feeling, not a complete verdict.
Featuring a book by Jenna Clark Embrey and Molly Beach Murphy and a score by Pat Monahan and his bandmates from Train (Jerry Becker and Matt Musty), “Begin Again” does a pretty good job of distilling and updating the movie. Carney’s film, notable mostly for the vibrantly gritty New York setting, the Oscar-nominated song “Lost Stars” and the lived-in performance of Mark Ruffalo, couldn’t help languishing in the shadow of the filmmaker’s breakout hit “Once,” which later became a Tony-winning musical.
“Begin Again” the musical is likely to suffer a similar fate. It lacks the quirky originality that made “Once” an unexpected Broadway juggernaut. But the new show, directed by Lorin Latarro and choreographed by David Neumann, has heart — there I go with that overused word again!
I succumbed to the show’s charms despite being aware that the comedy isn’t as freshly articulated as it should be and the music, while exuberant, doesn’t seem to emanate from the soul of Gretta, a reworked American version of the singer-songwriter character indifferently played by Keira Knightley in the movie.
Emma Busse as Gretta, center left, and Kevin William Paul as Max with the cast of “Begin Again.”
(Jeff Lorch)
Gretta relates to her songs as though she were the next Joni Mitchell, but the new material she’s composing on the fly with her new friends doesn’t seem particularly intimate or revealing. I liked the indie rock sound, but mostly for the collaborative liftoff. Lyrically, I wasn’t drawn in. But who could resist the ecstatic momentum of her ad hoc band members buying into her grassroots dream?
Gretta, played with folksy innocence by Emma Busse, has traveled to New York from Pennsylvania with her boyfriend Max (Kevin William Paul). A musician with frontman good looks, he’s about to be packaged into a rock star. Gretta’s songwriting has paved the way for this opportunity, but Max is told that he’s being signed as a singer-songwriter and sharing credit is a deal-breaker.
Selfless, naive Gretta gives Max her blessing and her rights, and almost immediately he betrays her with another woman. Perhaps even more disloyally, he allows his producers to run her song “Don’t Let Go” through a pop blender that drains it of all its personal meaning and artistic integrity.
Alone in the big city, she takes refuge at the Queens apartment of college friend Stevie (Casey Whyland), formerly Steve in the movie, the comic sidekick role played by James Corden. Stevie, conveniently, is a sound engineer with an analog heart. She’s not only how Dan (an electric Patrick Heusinger), a washed-up music executive with a broken marriage and a drinking problem, discovers Gretta. But without Stevie’s technical ingeniousness, the prospect of recording an album in outdoor New York locations would never have been possible.
The professional meet-cute between Gretta and Dan happens at an open-mic night at a dive. Stevie calls a heartbroken Gretta to the stage to perform, and she reluctantly complies before giving up in embarrassment. She thinks she’s bombed, but Dan, who has “magic ears,” hears what the song could be.
Patrick Heusinger as Dan, left, and Adrienne Walker as Miriam with the cast of “Begin Again.”
(Jeff Lorch)
Just as Dan glimpses Gretta’s raw potential, she sees his lost purpose, and the two launch a mutual rescue mission. He brings Gretta to meet Saul (Nik Walker), who co-founded Distressed Records with him and just fired him for his erratic behavior. Saul doesn’t have Dan’s ability to spot future talent, but he agrees to give the singer a listen if they cut a demo. And so off Dan and Gretta go, with no budget, to make memorable music together.
Friends are their main resource — and that proves an inexhaustible boon. “Begin Again” really comes alive as Gretta, Dan and their expanding, can-do music network starts pooling its expertise.
You can hear the songs germinating from lonely inspiration to group transformation — and the sound is exhilarating. The process of songwriting, rather than being a solitary slog, is a collective joy, rapturously captured in the number “Write a Way.” And “Twilight Summer Sky,” the number performed on the rooftop of Stevie’s apartment building in Queens, represents perhaps the fruit of all the group’s effort.
“Begin Again” is a musical fantasy, not a work of realism. Gretta and Dan are seemingly brought together by fate to heal one another. As they separately go about their business in New York before they’re introduced, they continually pass like ships in the night in a New York that scenic designer Derek McLane summons in a shifting comic-strip landscape of high-rises that gives the city an industrial quaintness.
The action rewinds from Gretta and Dan’s initial meeting at the bar, and later fast–forwards to speed up some of the more boring bits of the album-writing process. The ensemble moves backward and forward with these narrative jump-cuts.
This literalness can seem overly cute. (I prefer the idiosyncratic yet fully integrated movement direction Steven Hoggett brought to John Tiffany’s Broadway production of “Once.”) But Latarro’s staging and Neumann’s choreography keep the storytelling moving at a pleasantly brisk clip. And Skylar Fox’s illusion design adds an element of visual sorcery.
The cast of “Begin Again.”
(Jeff Lorch)
It’s the actors, however, who elevate the material, supplying a depth of feeling where the writing offers something more general. Heusinger makes it possible to leave Ruffalo’s fine portrayal behind. This is a different and more dynamic Dan, at least in terms of the musical demands placed on the character. Paul’s Max is every bit a rock star, but Dan is convincing as both a burned-out music mogul with a self-sabotaging streak and a gifted artist in his own right who just needs someone to believe in his producing instincts again.
Adrienne Walker, who plays Miriam, Dan’s estranged wife, and Charlotte MacLeod, who plays Violet, Dan’s disaffected daughter, endow their characters with more lineaments than the book provides. Walker’s Saul doesn’t do what Yasiin Bey managed in the movie — make Distressed Records seem like a real New York record company — but his singing compensates for some of the clumsier aspects of his reduced role.
Whyland’s Stevie, serving as emcee when the occasion calls for one, combines genuine camaraderie with comic relief. The gender switch makes sense, and Whyland embodies the spirit of artistic cooperation that makes “Begin Again” such an invigorating experience.
I wish that the musical didn’t amplify Gretta’s artistic insecurities and distress over the breakup with Max. The character seems less self-assured and more wounded than she did in the movie, making her fervently held idealistic beliefs about creative independence seem borrowed from another character. But Busse brings an American innocence to the role, and her ardor about music and community seems genuine.
“Begin Again” transcends its limitations through the kinetic connection of the cast. When all the elements of the music come together, a triumphant feeling — call it uplift — charges the air.
Hallmark films have mastered the art of escalating low-stakes situations into high-stakes emotional emergency plotlines. They have made a lucrative business out of absurdities.
It’s a proven formula that leans into the ridiculousness of mundane situations but earns its audience every holiday season. Whether it’s watching the movies for comfort or to turn a viewing party into a drinking game, millions of people tune in to laugh or cry watching them.
The Hallmark situations can be predictable, comfortable and wholesome, which can come off as absurd for a film plotline. Their sincerity and humor come from the cast’s commitment to the mundane, said Ron Oliver, writer and director of many Hallmark films.
A scene from “The History of Concrete.”
(Magnolia Pictures)
“Funny is only funny if you don’t think it’s funny,” he said. “We know that’s ridiculous. But at the same time, if the actor commits to it, it makes it seem real, then the audience gets it.”
He likes to think they’re laughing along with the idiosyncratic elements of the movies, and as long as it is creating a communal atmosphere, Oliver is all for it.
“If there’s anything we need these days, it’s a sense that people belong somewhere,” he added.
The formula isn’t what makes a movie a Hallmark movie. The structure has existed since God wore shorts, said Oliver. The channel’s achievement has been its ability to turn the structure into a recognizable brand through its stories.
When filmmaker John Wilson was in between jobs after finishing his HBO show “How To With John Wilson” during the writers’ strike, he attended a seminar on how to write and sell a Hallmark film.
After seeing what makes the Hallmark brand recognizable, Wilson decided to adapt the style into his own genre of making a documentary about concrete titled “The History of Concrete,” hoping the structure would help him finance the film.
John Wilson in “The History of Concrete.”
(Magnolia Pictures)
“But it’s very loose and almost impossible to even identify at points,” he said.
Instead of mocking the genre, Wilson subverts the Hallmark elements into his style of documenting, which finds the filmmaker recording trivial life moments — a person sitting on a pole, for example, or someone ruining a perfectly good jar of peanut butter by dipping their fingers into it — alongside his contextualizing narration.
“I both embrace but betray certain rules,” he said.
The seminar told him to avoid mentioning Christianity in the context of Christmas, so he pivoted to a Buddhist community with an annual tradition of running around a school in New York. The formula prefers to stay away from trauma. Instead, he made the death of one of his subject’s fiancées one of the main plotlines of the film.
“The actual Hallmark of it all fits in a way because that’s the kind of living proof that this rhythmic cyclical way of storytelling is actually soothing and attractive to people over long periods of time, to be able to return to this thing that they can trust and understand,” he added.
A scene from “The History of Concrete.”
(Magnolia Pictures)
In Wilson’s film, the entrance point is concrete, but what begins to unravel is a romance story involving a boy who has a movie idea, needs money to make a movie and tries everything he can to sell it — a signature love trope for most Hallmark movies.
Throughout the film, Wilson goes from pitch meeting to pitch meeting trying to finance his art. In the process, Wilson meets other eccentric characters that share his passion of filmmaking but have their own interests, like clearing gum from a sidewalk, immortalizing a person’s tattoo after they’re dead, and music.
“I’m just finding different ways to court this industry that doesn’t seem ready for this relationship,” Wilson said. “I’m trying to find some consensual way into it, but I eventually just need to perform the romantic gesture of doing what feels right and what comes naturally to me.”
The love story is the kind of theme that sometimes it’s OK to lean into, even though he’s constantly battling whether he should explore it in his films, Wilson added.
A scene from “The History of Concrete.”
(Magnolia Pictures)
Oliver believes that battle is a product of the cynicism that exists in society. Pledging love and respecting someone or a relationship can make people feel so uncomfortable that leaning into these tropes of life can feel humorous, and that’s where the laughs from a Hallmark film come from.
“They’re realizing that they’re being emotional about somebody who can’t find the right Christmas sweater,” he said.
The people in “The History of Concrete” aren’t funny because Wilson makes them out to be ridiculous. He doesn’t emphasize their eccentricities or tell the audience what makes them funny. He simply lets them be themselves. He captures their personality through a curiosity lens.
The humor comes from their passions not seeming worthy of the level of seriousness with which they pursue them. These people love something so much that their devotion mirrors the kind of energy normally reserved for higher stakes.
“There’s no definition of normal that sticks,” Wilson said.
A Christmas celebration isn’t objectively a life-or-death situation, and neither is concrete. But when people care deeply about them, those seemingly mundane things can take on an emotional significance the audience understands.
“Even if it’s something absurd … [the casts] are also committed to the idea of making it real,” Oliver said.
Next year, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra — an intimate, 42-player group compared with the more than 100-member Los Angeles Philharmonic — will warm its new home, the highly anticipated, Frank Gehry-designed Terri and Jerry Kohl Hall. And it will do so with the help of a little light music: fanfares commissioned from half a dozen preeminent film composers — John Williams, Ludwig Göransson, Joel McNeely, Thomas Newman, James Newton Howard and John Powell — curated by none other than Seth MacFarlane (best known as the creator and star of “Family Guy”).
The buzzwords are lighting up, but this is far from a game of performing arts Mad Libs; it’s actually quite intentional. “We really thought about … ‘What statement can we make to Los Angeles and to the performing arts world that really shows who we are?’” said LACO Executive Director Ben Cadwallader. “Who is the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, specifically? And it really was this tie to Hollywood, to Los Angeles, to our musicians themselves.”
MacFarlane was a natural fit.
“I loved movies and I loved movie music,” MacFarlane said of his childhood in a recent interview. “I would go to the record store and buy the latest John Williams soundtrack, which was usually out before the movie was released. I remember buying the ‘Jurassic Park’ soundtrack not having seen the movie, and it didn’t matter. It was just great music. It was just great, symphonic music.”
LACO was founded by an assemblage of musicians and civic leaders in 1968, including the cellist James Arkatov. After emigrating from Russia as a child, Arkatov became the principal cellist at the Pittsburgh and San Francisco symphonies before landing in L.A. He arrived as a Hollywood studio musician, played on movie soundtracks and did backing for Ella Fitzgerald.
From the beginning, LACO served as “the artistic outlet of studio players … these incredibly gifted musicians who bring our movies and TV shows to life,” said Cadwallader, a situation that remains true to this day. LACO’s musicians know it’s “a place where they can play … Bach and Mozart, and make music at a really high level in a performance environment, not a studio environment.”
This is why the christening of LACO’s new home is also a homage to its roots: film composers. These giants of their fields will each write a spry, five- to seven-minute-long fanfare as openers for select LACO concerts throughout the season. (The works will also be performed at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, with John Williams’ piece arriving first, in fall 2027.)
MacFarlane knew just what to do, thanks to his long history with music. The actor, animator, filmmaker and comedian has released 10 studio albums, received five Grammy Award nominations and performed as a vocalist at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall. (He also just released a 14-track album called “Seth MacFarlane Sings the Muppets.”) Plus, his parents raised him steeped in music.
Nothing has changed here — throughout his career, MacFarlane has been relentlessly committed to including live music in his projects. The musical numbers on “Family Guy” simply couldn’t (and wouldn’t) exist without an orchestra.
“It would somehow feel thin and hollow, and people may not know why their attention is drifting, but it would drift,” MacFarlane said. “I really think you need the muscular sound of 60 musicians in a room, and in the case of ‘The Orville,’ sometimes 90. … Hollywood has been doing it since pictures went to sound, and I hope they continue to do it for as long as we make film and television.”
MacFarlane noted that the only time many people actually hear a live orchestra is in film or television.
“I don’t know how many people go to the symphony,” MacFarlane said. “So that’s certainly a component. When I was a kid, even the syndicated afternoon cartoon shows used a live orchestra, and when you go back and you listen to them, oftentimes it’s pretty legit composing. And I think that was important to have heard. I think it’s just good for the brain to hear complex symphonic music.”
Composer, conductor and longtime MacFarlane collaborator Joel McNeely (whose wife, Margaret Batjer, is LACO’s concertmaster) got MacFarlane involved in this commissioning initiative. Then MacFarlane selected the participating composers (and supported the initiative financially). One final Mad Lib to solve: What exactly, you may be wondering, is a fanfare?
“The perfect example … is the beginning of ‘Star Wars,’” Cadwallader said, then hummed the intro. “There’s big, loud brass. You cannot help but pay attention. … It puts a smile on your face. It maybe gets your heart racing a little bit. It’s usually very rhythmic, very bright. It’s like a big warm smile, or like a popping of a Champagne cork, to start a concert. … A bursting, effervescent moment of music to get things started. An amuse-bouche, if you like.”
A two-part docuseries about Melania Trump arrives later this year, the first lady revealed Wednesday. The new project follows the January release of director Brett Ratner’s documentary, which made $16.7 million worldwide at the box office and was universally panned by critics.
“It will come out this year, and it will be very different what is in the movie,” Trump told “Fox & Friends” ahead of her appearance to ring the New York Stock Exchange opening bell. “It’s more [like a] conversation one on one with me.”
Trump indicated that the docuseries will cover new ground.
“So when I was traveling and doing all of the filming, the director was asking me questions, and there’s some private questions that I will answer that people never heard before,” she said.
The Times has reached out to Amazon Studios for more information on the project, which does not appear in press materials, though Ratner teased the new “chapters” in an Aug. 11 Instagram post.
“Here we go again….” the director wrote. “The saga continues …. can’t wait to share with everyone around the world the next two chapters of MELANIA, THE DOCU SERIES!”
Ratner’s film followed the first lady in the 20 days leading up to President Trump’s 2025 inauguration, promising “exclusive footage capturing critical meetings, private conversations, and never-before-seen environments” as Melania “orchestrates inauguration plans, navigates the complexities of the White House transition, and moves her family back to the Nation’s Capital.”
Critics, however, found the cinematic experience lacking.
“I’m hesitant to call ‘Melania’ propaganda because I can’t imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking that Melania Trump comes off well,” Times film critic Amy Nicholson wrote in a February review. “If this vapid, airless, mindless time-waster had subversive designs of being a satire about the first lady of the United States, there’s not much it would have changed. Yet somehow, ‘Melania’ is exactly the film that the first lady wanted to make — her company was paid $40 million for the rights to this self-greenlit production — and no one around her warned that it was a very expensive bad idea.”
“Melania” was Ratner’s first film since six women accused him of sexual assault in 2017. In February 2026, The Times reported that the “Rush Hour” filmmaker appeared in the unsealed Epstein files in photos with unidentified women and the financier, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
In addition to the initial $40 million Amazon MGM Studios paid to license the project, the marketing and promotion budget was reportedly another $35 million.
NEWBERRY SPRINGS, Calif. — Four decades ago, the cult hit “Bagdad Cafe” was filmed at a ramshackle diner in the Mojave Desert.
The tale of two women in the lonely landscape — a hardworking, rifle-wielding cafe owner and a stranded German tourist with a suitcase full of lederhosen — captivated viewers, particularly in Europe and Japan.
Busloads of international tourists rolled up to the actual Bagdad Cafe on a cracked, sunbaked stretch of Route 66.
Real-life proprietor Andrea Pruett, a sweet but steely Southerner who kept her own gun behind the counter, greeted them in French and German, then fed them buffalo burgers and omelets.
A memorial announcement for owner Andrea Pruett is seen at the Bagdad Cafe on Route 66 in the Mojave Desert.
As Pruett aged, her grip on reality loosened. But she refused to leave.
Now, the Bagdad Cafe is in limbo. Though T-shirts and tchotchkes are still for sale, the kitchen is closed. And Pruett’s family is figuring out what comes next.
Buses full of Europeans still come. So, too, do the roadtrippers celebrating Route 66, which turns 100 this year.
“We don’t get any locals, and we don’t cook any food right now,” said Mark Bradley, the cafe’s gruff but genial manager. “But we’re definitely on the map to see … it’s magic that takes place here.”
The cafe is a cacophony of color in an expanse of desert brown. Flags from all over — France, Brazil, Japan, New Zealand, Canada — hang from low ceilings. The walls are covered floor to ceiling by visitors’ passport photos and dollar bills with Sharpie signatures. “We’ve been here three times!” an Italian visitor raved in a guest book.
Pruett is still there, too. An urn holding her ashes sits by the front door.
A drone image shows the remote Bagdad Cafe on Route 66 in Newberry Springs.
In 1995, eight years after the movie’s European premiere, Pruett and her husband, Harold, stopped for burgers at what was then called the Sidewinder Cafe in Newberry Springs, 20 miles east of Barstow. They had just bought 640 acres for an ostrich ranch, which ultimately didn’t work out, though they kept some of the birds as pets.
The owner told them the A-frame, wood-shingled diner was for sale. “My husband looked at me and I said, ‘Don’t even think about it,’ ” Pruett told The Times in 2003.
But their son, actor Harold P. Pruett II — who was 26 and starring that year in a campy erotic horror flick called “Embrace of the Vampire” — declared the cafe “cool,” and that was that.
The Pruetts promptly rechristened it Bagdad Cafe, following German filmmaker Percy Adlon’s lead.
The exterior of the Bagdad Cafe.
Nearby Bagdad was a railroad town named in the 1880s by Southern Pacific Railroad officials after the Middle Eastern metropolis — without the H — because of the desert terrain.
Bagdad became a stop for steam-powered trains whose engines needed more water every eight miles or so in the desert climate, said Scott Piotrowski, past president of the California Historic Route 66 Assn.
The bustling little town was also a hub for gold, silver and copper mining camps.
Mining eventually faded, but cars on Route 66 overheated easily and often limped into town for water. A restaurant named, naturally, Bagdad Cafe, owned by a woman named Alice Lawrence, was the only place for miles with a dance floor and jukebox.
When Interstate 40 opened in 1972 about 10 miles north — taking most traffic and tourists away from Route 66 — it was the death knell for Bagdad, where all that remains today is a single scruffy cedar tree.
Thierry Farion, left, from France, and Aziz Khechine, right, from Tunisia, look at memorabilia inside the Bagdad Cafe.
At Pruett’s Bagdad Cafe, she embraced the movie. The two female characters, initially wary of each other, are both on a hiatus from their husbands, and the German tourist eventually draws big crowds by performing magic tricks.
“When people came in, it was like a director saying, ‘Action!’ ” said Pruett’s grandson, Greg Landers, 47, of Glassell Park. “She would just go right into welcoming people and telling them to sit down, answering their questions.”
A petite bottle-blonde who spoke with the laid-back drawl of her native Arkansas, Pruett showed off memorabilia signed by the “Bagdad Cafe” director. She got a yellow thermos like the one in the film, which, miraculously, never seems to run out of java, even when the coffee pot is busted.
A guest book displays messages at the Bagdad Cafe.
A desert road from Vegas to nowhere Some place better than where you’ve been A coffee machine that needs some fixing In a little café just around the bend
Pruett’s place drew desert eccentrics, including a gravelly-voiced man dubbed General Bob who sniped at customers who doubted his claims that he designed the Pentagon, built the Golden Gate Bridge, was a brain surgeon and was 109. (“Actually, he’s 83 years old, and if he wants to be older, I let him,” Pruett told NPR in 2003.)
Monaco’s Prince Albert II stopped in once. So did actress Renée Zellweger, who told Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” that there was a “little old guy, he’s been sitting there for, I think, maybe 45 years on the same barstool. We had chicken fried steak together.”
When Huell Howser popped in unannounced for a 2001 episode of his California road trip show, General Bob, perched at the bar with a fedora atop his long silver hair, proclaimed he was 98 years old and “a real general, not a f—up.”
Marian Box, left, works the counter and talks to visitor Jaelene Kleckner.
For all the joy, desert life brought plenty of hardship.
One night in the 1990s, not long after Pruett bought the place, she was closing out the cash register when a man walked in, slammed a wooden 2-by-4 on the counter and ordered her to put all the money in a bag.
“She actually had a shotgun under the counter, and she pulled it out and said, ‘Stop,’ and cocked it,” said Landers, her grandson.
The man threw his hands up and said his family was in the car. They had been traveling and ran out of money. Pruett ushered them inside, fed them and sent them away with some cash — after making them wash their own dishes.
Pruett, who gave birth to Landers’ father, Corky, at 15, had a tough and impoverished youth. But she was “kind almost to a fault,” said Landers, a contractor who lived with her for a spell in his 20s and worked in the cafe. People who just about everyone else had given up on — she’d give them a place to stay and work to do.
In February 2002, the younger of Pruett’s two sons, Harold the actor, died of an accidental drug overdose. Her husband died two months later.
Pruett’s love for her customers kept her going, said Bradley, who has been around the cafe for 26 years as a frequent visitor and employee.
“She would have them crying as they left, but happy crying,” he said. “She could do that to people by giving them a hug and in just the few minutes that they were here. She had a magic to her.”
In 2016, Sarah Jane Woodall — a former nude model who posts popular desert travelogues on YouTube under the moniker Wonderhussy — stopped for breakfast and shot a video.
The cafe was quiet and grimy. She loved it.
“It was just, like, a lovable hot mess,” said Woodall, an Army kid who lived for a time in Germany, where people were obsessed with the movie.
The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns devastated the Bagdad Cafe — and Pruett, who turned 80 in the summer of 2020.
The Europeans disappeared. Vandals busted the windows. Pruett let go of her waiters. Her kitchen closed and never reopened.
A sign for a former motel next to the Bagdad Cafe on Route 66 in Newberry Springs.
In 2021, her house burned down. She slept in the cafe, her thin frame curled up in a red vinyl booth.
That summer, Léa De Carmo, an aspiring actress, was driving back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas with a friend and, after a night of partying, craved a cup of coffee. They pulled into the Bagdad Cafe, where — as in the movie — the coffee pot was broken.
De Carmo, a native of Paris who had never seen the film, was stunned when she opened the door and “saw French flags and soccer team stuff everywhere.”
“It seems like all the French are led there for one reason or another,” said De Carmo, 29, who talked to Pruett that day for over two hours.
“She had essentially lost everything — her business, her house — but she just had this incredible energy and warmth and humor,” De Carmo said. “There was also this very deep loneliness.”
For the next four years, De Carmo drove from L.A. to Newberry Springs dozens of times, filming Pruett for a just-finished documentary called “The Keeper of Bagdad Cafe,” about her final years in the crumbling diner.
In the film, friends help Pruett move into an RV in the parking lot. As a woman gently washes her white hair with bottled water behind the cafe counter, Pruett says she can’t remember where she’s from.
“One thing she never forgot was the cafe,” De Carmo said. “She always knew where she was and that it was the place she wanted to be.”
Landers said his father, who died in 2022, asked her to move in with him in L.A., but she didn’t want to leave the Bagdad.
“It was just hard,” said Landers, who added that she might have fared better, physically, at least, in a dementia care facility. But she repeatedly said, “No, this is my place. This is where I want to be.”
Pruett’s friends in the desert stepped up. Bradley took care of her and the cafe, opening it each day for tourists to come in and take photos.
Woodall returned at the cafe’s request, filming the stained, decaying ceiling and the water-catching buckets and coffee pots on the floor. The YouTuber’s fans raised more than $25,000 — enough for a new roof.
In the video, Pruett stood by, smiling, quiet, a little confused.
For the next three years, she stayed at the Bagdad, even as her memory continued to fade. She died this January at 85.
On a Friday morning this summer, with the outside temperature already 115 degrees, Matt Parker stood behind the worn green Formica counter, setting a smart TV to the movie and preparing to make Nescafé instant coffee — a favorite of Europeans.
On a good day, they get three tour buses, he said.
Parker, 53, moved from L.A. County to Newberry Springs — where he used to camp with his dad and ride dirt bikes as a kid — a few years ago and fell in love with the cafe.
“You can’t recreate this,” he said. “We’re just caretakers of it. It’s a museum and church, in a sense, with all this stuff. Mrs. Pruett really focused on protecting it, protecting these people’s stuff — their mark.”
Andrea Pruett’s urn near the entrance of the Bagdad Cafe, which she ran for three decades.She died in January.
Landers said that, while the family figures out what to do with the cafe, he asked Bradley to keep it open like his grandma did.
Though her urn remains in the place she loved most, Landers hopes, someday, to bury her ashes in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery next to her youngest son.
Since her death, he can’t help but think of a scene from the movie. The German woman — forced to leave after her tourist visa expires — is gone and the bustling restaurant quiet again. A customer walks in and asks where the magic shows went.
A snoozing employee sits up and says: “The magic? It’s gone.”
In the end, the German returns to the Bagdad Cafe. And so do the crowds.
That much was clear Saturday at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art’s opening-night soiree, where the guest list was as celebrity-heavy as any Academy Awards after-party. As the festivities kicked off around sunset in the courtyard under the museum’s towering elliptical oculus, Oprah Winfrey hugged Robert De Niro, and Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart skipped the red carpet after chatting with Spike Lee. Laura Dern and Greta Gerwig laughed together by the entrance while Samuel L. Jackson plopped down on a curved bench, joking, “Hey, look what I did!”
For the record:
1:22 p.m. Sept. 20, 2026A previous version of this article said James Cameron was photographed along with a large group of directors at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. He was not.
He didn’t sit for long because Cynthia Erivo and Andy Garcia showed up and there were more hugs and handshakes and hellos. Owen Wilson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kim Kardashian, Meg Ryan, Jack Quaid, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Justin Trudeau, Mark Hamill and Magic Johnson were there too, and that was just the beginning.
Gov. Gavin Newsom attended the opening-night party for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art alongside a host of other notable guests and celebrities.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
After a rousing performance by a white-robe-clad vocal collective called Voices of Fire, co-founded by Pharrell Williams, Lucas’ wife Mellody Hobson noted that, “George kept saying, ‘Will this person come? Do you think this person will come?’”
“I said, ‘They will all come,’” Hobson said as the crowd laughed during opening remarks on a raised platform in the museum’s grand lobby.
And so they did. There was even a banner moment inside the posh fifth-floor Skywalker Grill where a group of directors gathered to be photographed in what could very well become a seminal photo of Hollywood influence in the 21st century. The shot included Lucas, Jon M. Chu, Chris Columbus, Francis Ford Coppola, Lee Daniels, Guillermo del Toro, Jon Favreau, Bryce Dallas Howard, Ron Howard, Peter Jackson, Chris Meledandri, Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, Tyler Perry, Steven Spielberg, Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, Nathan Fielder and David Benioff.
Organizers were scrambling to find Gerwig, but she had dashed off somewhere else.
“Star Wars” legendMark Hamill and his wife, Marilou York, were guests at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opening party.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
There were artists in attendance too, of course, but not as many. Jeff Koons, Refik Anadol, Judy Baca and Takashi Murakami strolled through the crowd, as did museum directors including the Broad’s Joanne Heyler and Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Michael Govan, who was relieved to be attending someone else’s party after hosting so many of his own in April and May when the new Geffen Galleries opened.
Lucas and Hobson went to great lengths to explain why the Lucas Museum matters and why it is different from other museums. Their comments, in many ways, sought to address the criticism that has been lobbed at the museum since it held its press preview a few weeks back.
Though it has received a number of rave reviews, critics have called narrative art a false conceit and argued that the juxtaposition of masterworks with pop culture ephemera does not work. Much of the criticism has been focused on a perceived lack of context since there is almost no wall text clarifying why certain curatorial choices were made.
George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson hosted an extravagant opening party at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“When I started it, everybody said, ‘You’re crazy. You shouldn’t do it. It’s not going to work. People are going to come after you,’” Lucas said of his plans for the museum. “I said, ‘People have come after me all my life, especially in the movies.’”
Lucas also addressed why he curated the museum’s 100,000 square feet of gallery space on his own, noting that at a certain point plans were “getting off the rails.”
“I’m going to have to take this over because people don’t understand what I’m doing,” Lucas recalled thinking. “The idea that illustration is an art form and illustrators are artists was just too much for somebody who had been taught otherwise by the art schools that they went to and the universities that they went to.”
People with PhDs often can’t see the big picture, Lucas said, “You can’t say ‘This is art. This is not art.’ Art is in the eye of the beholder. If it is emotional to you, then it’s art. And, of course, I’ve been criticized up and down and sideways for that. But I believe it wholeheartedly — that you get to decide what art is.”
Members of the Virginia Beach vocal collective Voices of Fire, co-founded by Bishop Ezekiel Williams and Pharrell Williams perform at the Lucas Museum.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Lucas noted that throughout his career he has worked with many illustrators, “and I will tell you, they are as talented as any artist I’ve ever met. This is the way of giving back to them something that they’ve all wanted … inevitably, all of the illustrators say the same thing — everybody from R. Crumb to Rockwell — they all say, ‘I wish I could be in a museum,’ but they can’t. There isn’t a major museum in the world that’ll have this kind of art in it. I’m hoping this will change that.”
Lucas’ comments came after his friend and co-host Queen Latifah noted to the cheering crowd that, “Paris has the Louvre, New York has the Met and now L.A. has the artistic equal.”
Guests mingle at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opening party.
(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)
It took more than a decade for the Lucas Museum to land in L.A. after a search that included Chicago and San Francisco as well as lots of civic pushback and lawsuits over the use of public parkland.
“We did not realize how hard it would be to give a city a museum,” Hobson said during her remarks, later joking: “If your husband or spouse comes home and says they want to build a museum, I suggest your response is a hard no.”
Laura Dern, left, and Greta Gerwig spent the early part of the night chatting and laughing.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Hobson went on to extol Lucas’ vision and his ability to never waver from his dream for the museum.
“He was driven to create a space that would showcase the brilliant illustrators that he thought were too often overlooked and ignored,” Hobson said. “And if critics say that a museum of narrative art is too much like a popcorn movie and not enough like an art film, well, we love popcorn movies in our family.”
Like a popcorn movie, the evening ended happily with a drone show in the night sky narrated by Winfrey and Jackson, and featuring images from the museum’s collection including the Cave of Altamira, N.C. Wyeth’s “The Storybook,” Julie Bell’s “The Huntress,” Banksy’s “Girl With Balloon,” the “Star Wars” Millennium Falcon and Maxfield Parrish’s “Ecstasy.”
Afterward the party moved inside from the rooftop terrace for a performance by the Black Eyed Peas.
“It felt like a movie” — that’s what we all said in the days and weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, when a Michael Bay action film slammed uncomfortably into real life. But with the perspective of 25 years, what’s lingered for the most part aren’t the most literal depictions of the day, but oblique dramas that capture something more subtle: the free-floating anxiety of a nightmare. In our list, you’ll find titles that confront Sept. 11 directly, but others that bring to mind a deeper, broader canon of trauma.
‘Donnie Darko’ (2001)
Jake Gyllenhaal in the 2001 movie “Donnie Darko.”
(NewMarket Films)
Going to the movies in the fall of 2001 was a solace and escape for many New Yorkers, though the films themselves often had an eerie, unplanned timeliness that made them resonate in an unshakable way. You could ache for the cozy city of the past in “The Royal Tenenbaums” or grapple with the schism of everything suddenly feeling different in “Mulholland Drive.” Or you could envelop yourself in Richard Kelly’s moody “Donnie Darko,” a teen drama touched by metaphysical doominess in which plane engines fall from the sky and death wears a rabbit costume. The movie has since become an unexplainable piece of comfort for a spooked generation. In its weather, its soundtrack and the haunted stare of Jake Gyllenhaal, it evokes the weeks after 9/11, even if it anticipated them. — Joshua Rothkopf
‘25th Hour’ (2002)
Edward Norton in the movie “25th Hour.”
(David Lee / Touchstone Pictures)
Only months after the attacks, Spike Lee took on 9/11 with a boldness that only 15 years of provocative filmmaking — and a lifetime of loving New York — could sharpen into an artist. This interpersonal drama, about the fallout of a drug dealer (Edward Norton) going to prison, was deep in development when real-life events altered its trajectory. Lee insisted on including the American flags dotting lawns, the general sense of unease and, in a somber touch, a credits sequence featuring the Tribute in Light. Overwhelmingly, one scene takes place in a Tribeca hi-rise with a view of ground zero, and even though the conversation itself concerns a friend in trouble, it quickly shifts onto metaphorical grounds of guilt, responsibility and rage. There still may not be a better 9/11 film than this one. — J. Rothkopf
‘Munich’ (2005)
A scene from the movie “Munich.”
(Karen Ballard / Universal Pictures)
On the surface, Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” released earlier in 2005, may seem like his more obviously 9/11-coded film (“Is it the terrorists?” Dakota Fanning’s character asks). But “Munich,” which followed six months later, goes straight to the questions of terrorism and endless cycles of retaliation that hung over the period. Eric Bana plays Avner, a Mossad operative sent to hunt down the Palestinians whom Israel holds responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. As the revenge killings mount, the mission begins to eat away at him — and Avner’s belief in closure is shaken. Spielberg makes the contemporary connections hard to ignore. In a final scene, set in mid-’70s New York, after Avner and his handler Ephraim, played by Geoffrey Rush, argue over what they have done, the camera pans across the Manhattan skyline southward, toward the Twin Towers, which Spielberg had digitally added to the shot. — Josh Rottenberg
‘United 93’ (2006)
A scene from the movie “United 93.”
(Jonathan Olley / Universal Pictures)
Five years after 9/11, it still wasn’t clear whether audiences were ready for a Hollywood movie that directly re-created the attacks. Director Paul Greengrass, then most recently of “The Bourne Supremacy,” took on the hijacked flight whose passengers fought back before it crashed in Pennsylvania. He used a largely unknown cast and shot with an almost documentary immediacy, cutting between the plane and air-traffic controllers trying to make sense of what was happening. There’s no movie star to take charge, and Greengrass doesn’t inflate the passengers into larger-than-life heroes. We simply watch as they piece together the situation from phone calls and scraps of information and realize what they have to do. We know from the beginning that none of them will survive. Watching them slowly come to that realization is what makes “United 93” so devastating. — J. Rottenberg
‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
Christian Bale in the movie “The Dark Knight.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
It was probably inevitable that the anxieties of the post-9/11 era would find their way into a Batman movie. In “The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan fills Gotham with bombings, acts of mass surveillance and questions about how far is too far. Heath Ledger’s Joker is an enemy who doesn’t play by the rules, attacking the city with no clear political goal beyond creating panic and chaos. Christian Bale’s Batman, meanwhile, builds a Patriot Act-like system that turns every cellphone in Gotham into a tracking device and uses increasingly brutal methods to stop him. Nolan folds all of that into a hugely entertaining superhero movie without turning it into a lecture. — J. Rottenberg
‘Man on Wire’ (2008)
Philippe Petit, as seen in the documentary “Man on Wire.”
(Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris)
By the time James Marsh’s Oscar-winning documentary arrived in 2008, the Twin Towers had been gone for seven years. The film recounts French high-wire artist Philippe Petit’s astonishing 1974 stunt, in which he and a small band of co-conspirators secretly rigged a cable between the towers, allowing Petit to walk high above lower Manhattan. The movie never needs to mention 9/11 to feel devastating. We already know what became of those buildings. Watching Petit step onto the wire lets us see them differently, not as the site of catastrophe but as the setting for something beautiful and absurdly daring. A ghostly montage of the Twin Towers being constructed, set to composer Michael Nyman’s “Fish Beach,” brought New Yorkers to tears. For me, that feeling is also personal. I was living in New York on 9/11 and had been at an outdoor concert in the plaza beneath the towers just weeks before the attacks, so there was something especially moving about seeing them again as part of the city’s everyday life. — J. Rottenberg
‘The Hurt Locker’ (2009)
Anthony Mackie, left, and Jeremy Renner in the movie “The Hurt Locker.”
(Jonathan Olley / Summit Entertainment)
Has there ever been a better cinematic metaphor for the War on Terror than Jeremy Renner in a bomb suit, kneeling over a device in a Baghdad street while everyone around him scans the rooftops for danger? Kathryn Bigelow’s film narrows the Iraq War down to the nerve-shredding work of an explosives-disposal unit, with Renner’s Staff Sgt. William James almost eerily comfortable in situations that terrify everyone around him. The suspense often comes down to the simplest question: Is this thing going to blow up? Bigelow, the action expert behind “Point Break” and “Strange Days,” mostly leaves the larger politics offscreen and stays with the men doing the dangerous work, their detachment a survival tactic. Though initially little-seen, “The Hurt Locker” pulled off its own improbable feat, becoming, at the time, the lowest-grossing movie to ever win Oscar’s best picture — while Bigelow became the first woman ever to win best director. — J. Rottenberg
‘Margaret’ (2011)
Anna Paquin and Matt Damon in the movie “Margaret.”
(Myles Aronowitz / 20th Century Fox)
Kenneth Lonergan shot this seething, richly authentic New York City drama in 2005, when the rawness of post-9/11 NYC was already a part of everyday life. But the trauma feels ingrained in every frame, and there are shots of wary street life — an occasional flinch or look upward — that New Yorkers could watch and think: Yes, that’s what it felt like. The plot itself concerns a teenage girl, Lisa (Anna Paquin, never better), whose hyperdramatic tendencies are both recognizable and lovable. She is involved in a bus accident that results in a fatality and, with the crusading passion that so many people felt after 9/11, decides to get involved as a witness and truth-teller. The need to fix things — amid so much that was unfixable — is a marker of all the movies on this list. — J. Rothkopf
‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2012)
Jessica Chastain, center, in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”
(Jonathan Olley / Columbia Pictures)
Perhaps the most explicit film on our list, Kathryn Bigelow’s daring military procedural about the 2011 midnight raid that took out Osama bin Laden was a political hot potato in its moment. Now with distance, it impresses as a skilled piece of political moviemaking, one that captures the era’s sense of moral compromise and queasy vengeance. It contains scenes of torture and goes deeply into the CIA’s planning and execution of the operation — choices that remain provocative. But the movie’s most lingering piece of drama is a silent shot of one woman crying in a cargo plane: a high-level analyst played by Jessica Chastain, who has accomplished the unthinkable but doesn’t feel relief. The fight will not end. Only a filmmaker who had just won Oscars and made history would have been granted the artistic freedom to make this movie, arguably Bigelow’s finest. — J. Rothkopf
It’s been five years since “Call My Agent!,” known in its home country as “Dix pour cent” (“10 percent”), ended with the staff of Paris’ bankrupt ASK talent agency moving en masse toward the exit, as in the closing moments of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
The rich workplace comedy mounted four seasons from 2015 to 2020; the fourth was made without its creator, Fanny Herrero (she went on to create the fine but less successful “Standing Up,” about Parisian comics). But she has returned, along with “Standing Up” writer Lison Daniel, for “Call My Agent! The Movie,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, which picks up the scattered ensemble more or less where they imagined they’d be when the series ended, and gets them back in the same frame.
As a movie, it’s its own sort of beast — a complete statement in a single package, with not just A and B stories, but C and D as well, and arcs that might develop over a season of the show compressed into a couple of hours. But its essentials are essentially unchanged: It’s still about the difficulty of making art, and the often unsavory business that lets art get made, with known actors playing fun house versions of themselves and our heroes attempting to wrangle them into order, with whatever works — lies, bribes, real shared feelings. The regular cast, many of whom Americans will first have met here, still feel identical with their characters, rather than just professionals who have been paid to play them, so that even when the action is outlandish the emotions are real.
The focus here is on the fierce Andréa (Camille Cottin), who has left agenting and is about to direct her first movie, a drama set in the woods, and Noémie (Laure Calamy), whom Andrea hires as a replacement producer — she has become the producer of a hit workplace comedy, “Les Colleagues,” the sort of show that produces a lot of branded merch — believing that she can mold Noémie to her will. On the domestic front, Andréa separated from partner Colette (Ophélia Kolb), a co-parent to her daughter Flora — some sticky questions will arrive, doubling the pressure.
Noémie is still with Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), once the most formidable of agents, who has quieted down somewhat owing to a Season 4 heart attack, and the fact that he’s working in the agency his daughter Camille (Fanny Sidney) announced at the end of the series. He’s feeling old (comparatively, he is, at 64 — though Liliane Rovère as agent emeritus Arlette beats him at 93) and things with Noémie are not great, which sets the stage for some romantic comedy, including a wild boar.
Andréa’s movie brings the old cast together, including sensitive junior agent turned aspiring actor Hervé (Nicolas Maury), and I am glad to see them. (Stéfi Celma’s Sophia, a receptionist turned actor, is sadly missing.) Much goes wrong, before things go right. (It’s a comedy, they will — though there are some moving dramatic moments along the way.) To be sure, there are no backstage comedies — or dramas, or dramedies — in which nothing goes wrong, or things even go mostly right. Disaster is the air they breathe.
On the eve of production, Andrea loses her male lead (Laurent Lafitte as himself) to a Wes Anderson movie; the psychologically delicate actor they get to replace him, Vincent Macaigne as himself, who’s represented by former ASK agent Gabriel (Grégory Montel), now working for their old rival, has a messy history with the other lead, Laetitia Casta, also as herself. They can barely work together. (There will be a bit of romantic comedy wrapped around this thread, as well.)
Then there’s a storm.
The French actors playing themselves are not well known here — Casta may be more familiar as a ’90s supermodel, for those who are familiar with that sort of thing — but Americans have been given the gift of cameos from Eva Longoria and an uncredited George Clooney who takes a comically unproductive lunch meeting with Andrea, crashed, in more than one sense, by Noémie.
Though the series finale made for a satisfying ending, there was already talk then of another season or a film. Still, “The Movie” arrives seemingly out of left field, as sort of a happy surprise. It doesn’t betray its legacy. We know from the supermarket magazines and internet scandal sites that some actors are seemingly as crazy as these actors pretend to be. But somehow movies get made. Most every show business satire is also a show business celebration. There’s no business like it.
It’s pronounced “human.” Yet writer-director Siân Heder acknowledges that the unusual spelling of the title of her new movie, “Being Heumann,” is something people might give a puzzled second look, unsure of how to say it and possibly dismissing it altogether.
Which, the more she sat with it, made it perfect as the title for a portrait of real-life disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who, while being in a wheelchair, made herself undismissable.
More specifically, the film looks at the pivotal 1977 protest in which Heumann led a group in a 26-day sit-in at a federal office building in San Francisco until the government began enforcing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the first federal law that recognized disability as a civil rights category.
“The fact that her last name was ‘human’ has so many beautiful layers of meaning,” says Heder, 49, during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “I think Judy was asking for the world to see disabled people as human beings who were worthy of rights and being looked at and being included.”
A world premiere and the opening-night selection of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which begins on Thursday, “Being Heumann” will hit theaters Nov. 6 and begin streaming on Apple TV Nov. 13. It is also, crucially, Heder’s first film since 2021’s “CODA,” the bittersweet drama about a young woman in a Deaf family (the title is an acronym for “child of Deaf adults”) that won three Academy Awards including adapted screenplay for Heder and best picture.
Actor Ruth Madeley and filmmaker Siân Heder during production on “Being Heumann.”
(Apple TV)
In Heumann, a wheelchair user after contracting polio as a child, Heder found a subject who was in the process of discovering herself as a leader: learning when to hold firm and when to cede ground and empower other people. And for someone who was grappling with the aftermath of unexpected success, that felt familiar.
“I think I was making a movie about myself, honestly,” Heder says. “When you’re moving forward on a massive project or a movement or anything, there’s a necessary drive and ambition and focus that is needed. And if you look at any major change that’s happened in human history, it takes a certain kind of person to push that through. I’m not identifying myself with great leaders of the civil rights movement, but directing a movie is a similar thing.”
Heder is tucked into a quiet corner of a busy coffee shop in L.A.’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, where she has long lived. She is in the process of moving from one historic house to an even older one a few blocks away. Heder didn’t want to disrupt the schooling of her two young children, ages 10 and 12, and has become too enmeshed in the area to want to leave it.
“There’s definitely an element of: ‘She manipulated everyone with that movie. She made us all cry and that’s why she won,’” Heder says of “CODA,” her Oscar-winning best picture. “I was an indie filmmaker that was compelled to tell that story.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Community is a word that comes up often over the course of a conversation with Heder, who has a warm manner and a quiet self-possession. Though “CODA” may have brought her wider attention, she was far from a novice by the time she made that film. She won a Peabody Award as a writer on the series “Men of a Certain Age” and was a writer, director and producer on the acclaimed “Orange Is the New Black.” She expanded her 2006 short film “Mother” into her first feature “Tallulah,” about a young woman who takes a baby from a reckless mother and tries to pass it off as her own. It premiered at Sundance in 2016.
Winning the Oscar created changes in her life both big and small. Heder at first kept it on her desk at home, but had to move it because she began to feel the statuette’s crossed arms quietly judging her as she worked. When she drove herself to the Spirit Awards the year after “CODA’s” triumph and spontaneously gave a ride to an afterparty to Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Heder suddenly realized her 10-year-old Subaru wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
“I have a nicer car now,” she says, laughing at the memory. “It’s baby steps.”
The day after the Oscars, Heder recalls that she couldn’t stop crying, all the pressure built up from months of campaigning events and Q&As finally letting itself out.
She says two things changed almost immediately after winning the Oscar. One was a sense of expectation, wanting to make the most of whatever the moment might allow.
“This was not a part of my plans,” she says. “I didn’t ever intend to have so many eyeballs turn to me and go, ’What are you doing now?’”
The second was simply the volume of material and opportunities incoming. Heder says she met with Marvel “so many times” about different projects but none of them felt right. As an independent filmmaker “you’re always pushing against the no,” she puts it, moving projects forward against all odds. But now she felt she had to be the resistance, the one to ask whether something was worthwhile.
“Suddenly there are a lot of voices chiming in too because your reps have an idea of what you should do next and the industry has an idea of what you should do next,” Heder says. “And it was really important for me to center myself back in a feeling of: I’ve always been drawn to stories because they move me. And that hasn’t changed.”
Her Oscars triumph was also the night of the notorious Will Smith-Chris Rock on-stage slap, which overshadowed coverage. Heder is online enough that she knows that some film fans would want an asterisk next to the Oscar wins for “CODA,” as if to note some sort of COVID-era exception for the first film from a streaming service to win Hollywood’s top award.
“There’s definitely an element of: ‘She manipulated everyone with that movie. She made us all cry and that’s why she won,’” Heder says with a edge of defiance. “I was an indie filmmaker that was compelled to tell that story. And then audiences embraced that story and that story took off in a way that was unexpected and surprising even for me.”
Siân Heder holds her Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “CODA” backstage during the Oscars in 2022.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Heder had been developing “Being Heumann” before “CODA” was released. A friend encouraged Heder to see the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp,” which includes Heumann as a subject, and the filmmaker was so struck by that story, she followed up by reading Heumann’s 2020 memoir.
She sent Heumann a cold email expressing interest in the book. As it turned out, Heumann was deciding that very day who should direct a movie of her life. Heumann gave the filmmaker a last-minute chance to pitch herself. After saying she’d cast authentically disabled performers as she did on “CODA,” Heder got the job.
Heder would work for two years on researching and developing the project with Heumann, interviewing dozens of people involved in the actual Carter-era protest. When Heumann died unexpectedly in 2023, Heder did not think she could continue, but it was “Crip Camp” co-director James Lebrecht who convinced her otherwise.
“I think Judy’s death, which was sudden — it made me feel like she had left her legacy in my hands,” remembers Heder.
After developing other scripts post-Oscars that never quite became her next film, Heder eventually found herself in the enviable position of having two projects greenlit at once: “Being Heumann” at Apple and an adaptation of Gabrielle Zevin’s popular novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” at Paramount.
As she was trying to make a decision, she went to a meeting with several other directors about the relaunching of the Village Theater in Westwood. She found herself having coffee with Guillermo del Toro and asked him how he decided between potential projects.
“And he said, ‘Make the movie that can’t get made without you,’” she recalls. “And that was very clarifying for me. When you are the element that gets that story told, it takes on an importance and urgency.”
As can often be the case, Del Toro’s advice confirmed what she already felt and she began to move forward with “Being Heumann.” (She is currently prepping “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” so there will not be another five-year gap between releasing films.)
“I was having a rare moment of power in the industry to push something forward,” Heder says, “and it felt like there was a path to go make a big paycheck and have that kind of jump up, or I could use that moment of power and success to try to push through the hardest project I could think of. It was in that moment, after ‘CODA,’ where I really realized: I could make this incredibly difficult movie that no one might make.”
Andrew Pilkington, from left, Siena Rafter, Charlie Rush-Reese, Dylan O’Brien, Roberta Colindrez, Ruth Madeley and Madeline Delp in the movie “Being Heumann.”
(Apple TV)
Following what Heder describes as “the casting Olympics,’ she arrived at BAFTA-nominated actor Ruth Madeley, a wheelchair user, to play the lead role. “Being Heumann” was shot in Toronto, largely on a soundstage built to stand in for the San Francisco federal office building where the sit-in took place.
“Hollywood might be the least accessible industry out there,” Heder notes while beginning to explain the accommodations that needed to be made for a cast that included performers with a wide range of disabilities. Custom-built trailers were created and the set had to be made accessible in ways that a filming location typically is not. An accessibility team oversaw everything, from large-scale logistics to the personal needs of individual background actors.
Rather than a more conventional biopic, Heder wanted to tell the more specific story of the 504 sit-in, building out an ensemble of characters around Heumann.
“I said, “It’s almost like ‘Bad News Bears’ and ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ together,” says Heder. “There’s an underdog-sports-team feeling and bank-heist-gone-wrong.”
But a filmmaker friend asked her: Is making movies about disability now her “thing”? It is a question Heder had already considered.
“Of course it was on my mind if it starts to feel like: Oh, is Siân Heder a social justice warrior who’s just out to try to make these movies that have some kind of message behind them,” she says preemptively. “But I think this is just a great story. Outside of disability, outside of anything else, it is a great story.”
Heder remains interested in stories about outsiders, about class and people generally ignored by or on the fringes of society. And it remains important that she herself feel a part of a larger community in her life and her work.
“My daughter said to me the other day, ‘Mom, I think you’re the right kind of famous because you are important to people who know who you are, but you can still just be in the world and be anonymous.” And I think there’s something true about that.”
Her daughter has obviously inherited Heder’s deep well of empathy, one that is more concerned with bringing new, unseen stories to the screen than with the pursuit of cool points or pure fame.
“‘Earnest’ has become a dirty word,” says Heder. “And what earnest actually means is direct and truthful.”
Some fans claim Nintendo’s latest update about new film is ‘criminal’
Fans were stunned that a trailer was not shown for the film(Image: Nintendo)
Nintendo shared a huge update during a special presentation.
Fans have admit they are left in tears over an ‘insane’ decision regarding the upcoming live-action Legend of Zelda movie. The adaptation is set to hit the big screen next year.
This afternoon (September 9) the popular games company behind the franchise hosted a special ‘Nintendo Direct’ in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the series. The main event for the presentation was the first reveal of gameplay for the upcoming remake of classic Nintendo 64 title, Ocarina of Time.
However, game designer Shigeru Miyamoto who helped create Legend of Zelda and other iconic series such as Super Mario Bros, Star Fox and Pikmin began the presentation by sharing the latest behind the film. He confirmed the release date of April 30, 2027 and also the title.
Unlike the game series, which usually utilises subtitles, the film will just be called The Legend of Zelda. Miyamoto told fans that they will “understand why it is called that” when they watch the movie for themselves.
He also explained that the film is a unique story that takes inspiration from plotlines and concepts from multiple titles across the series.
However, despite many predictions, there was no trailer or footage of the film itself shown. This did not sit well with many fans, who slammed the decision.
Several did not waste time in sharing their thoughts on social media. One posted: ” No trailer of the Zelda movie is insane to be honest.”
One agreed: “Holding a standalone Zelda direct and not having a movie trailer ready for it is absolutely insane.” Another added: “So there isn’t a Zelda movie trailer today… I mean it’s fine the movie isn’t out till April but this was the perfect time to release even just a glimpse.”
Someone else claimed: “No Zelda movie trailer is criminal I do have to say.” One person asked: “I thought we were having the Zelda movie trailer too?! What happened?!”
A person who tuned into the Direct commented: “I’m crying. No Zelda movie trailer, not even a teaser.”
Ahead of The Super Mario Bros Movie and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Nintendo often shared cast and trailers during their Direct presentations. However, it was announced that future news about the Zelda movie will be shared via their app.
Some of the cast is known for the Zelda film including Benjamin Evan Ainsworth playing Link and Bo Bragason taking on the role of Princess Zelda . The title is set to feature Sam Neil’s final performance before his death but his role is still not known.
The Legend of Zelda will release in cinemas April 30, 2027.
Andrew Scott considers the question and looks at me with a mischievous grin, retreating to a corner of the restaurant booth where we’re catching up a few hours before his new movie, “Elsinore,” the most personal film he has ever made, premieres at the Telluride Film Festival.
Scott turns over the question again. “Do I believe in ghosts?”
It feels like a reasonable thing to ask. Three years ago at Telluride, the yearning romantic fantasy “All of Us Strangers” memorably premiered, featuring Scott playing a character who worked through unresolved trauma by talking to the dead. Ghosts are elsewhere in his work, metaphorical (“Vanya”) and literal (“Hamlet”).
“If I had a gun put to my head — which you don’t have to — I would say that I don’t believe in them,” Scott says. “But the idea of the afterlife and where we will go is still really fascinating to me. Dreams and the subconscious, too. I don’t know what went on consciously in the world outside my hotel room here last night. I was perfectly content to be asleep. And I like the idea of thinking about death that way. I’ll just be asleep. It’ll be OK. It’s the undiscovered country.”
“The movie for me is about time,” says Andrew Scott. “What are you going to do with your time? Ian decided to to live and to be a light and to be around people for the glory of the theater.”
(Anthony Dickenson / Focus Features)
Dropping a line from Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy in this context feels unavoidable. In the powerfully moving “Elsinore,” Scott plays the real-life actor Ian Charleson, who, as he was secretly dying from AIDS, played Hamlet in a 1989 Royal National Theatre production, still considered one of the great performances in London theater history. Charleson was 40 at the time, known for playing Scottish Olympic athlete and missionary Eric Liddell in “Chariots of Fire.” He died eight weeks after leaving the National Theatre stage. “Elsinore” captures that journey in all of its glories and taxing challenges.
“That he would go for treatment in the morning and then play this Olympian role is just endlessly moving,” Scott says. “I don’t know how he did it.”
With our pint glasses filled with water as we adjust to Telluride’s altitude, we try to figure it out.
Charleson playing Hamlet, scaling the Everest for actors, reminded me of David Bowie making “Blackstar” as he was dying. As an artist, you’re not often given the chance to shape the narrative of your own end.
Being offered Hamlet doesn’t happen to every actor. To take it and turn it into something generous and useful — useful is a word I love about acting, that it’s useful to people.
When people are feeling down, they can watch a movie they love.
And see themselves. That can’t be underestimated.
What’s your go-to movie?
I will always watch “Bridesmaids” when it comes on TV. Comedy is precious to me. Laughing is precious to me. I don’t see it as the antithesis of tragedy. I think they’re one and the same.
The last time we talked, around the time of “Ripley,” you wanted to put out into the universe the idea of starring in a musical or a comedy. That hasn’t happened by the strictest definition. But you seem to be saying that genre labels don’t matter.
The reason, hopefully, that “Elsinore” is moving is that we approach some of the stuff with quite a bit of lightness. The effect is tragic and there are some heavy things in it. But my job, what I prioritized, is keeping it light.
My favorite actors are the ones that are funny. I worked with Lisa Kudrow last year on “The Comeback,” and yes, of course, she’s very funny. But if you look at that performance she gives toward the end, it’s so moving. People come away from things that are labeled comedies and go, “I just laughed at that.” Or people come away from things that maybe were really sad and say, “I was just devastated by that.” I think the job is to get rid of categorizing and make it more fluid.
Like life. Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes, the bear, he eats you.
Exactly! I don’t love things that are overly serious. One of my big dreams for this film — and I do wish so much for this film because it’s so personal — is that people don’t feel like that they’re going to see something that’s depressing. I didn’t want to fetishize Ian’s death.
What do you hope audiences take away from watching it?
That they see themselves in it. You know, it doesn’t end well for any of us. The movie for me is about time. What are you going to do with your time? Ian decided to to live and to be a light and to be around people for the glory of the theater.
Speaking of time, next month you’re going to be celebrating a milestone, turning 50. Or not celebrating. I don’t know how you feel about birthdays.
I don’t love my birthday.
Any year?
My friends have said to me, “You gotta make some plans.” I love a party. Which is to say, I love other people’s parties. What I usually do is I leave it to the last minute and send texts around, saying, “I understand if you don’t want to come, but I might do this.” And then you do something small. I read something yesterday where you should go to your own parties like you’re a guest. I think that’s a very good way to to do it.
What about just being around for half a century? Is that in your head? You’re the one who just said it doesn’t end well for any of us.
I’ve definitely thought about it more. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’ve thought, “Jesus, what?” I’m sure that’s because of my mom dying and that I’m approaching my mortality. Again, how am I going to use my time? One of the reasons I was so ferocious about getting “Elsinore” made was that I would put all of myself into this and then maybe I can chill out a bit more.
Andrew Scott in the movie “Elsinore.”
(Anthony Dickenson / Focus Features)
The personal aspects of this movie are striking. In addition to producing “Elsinore,” you yourself have played Hamlet on stage. You’re also a gay actor portraying someone who, at the time, would have torpedoed his career by coming out.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the movies and would read Premiere and Empire magazine. Around 16 or 17, I started to realize that maybe if you’re gay, you wouldn’t be invited to movies. And I wasn’t wrong in thinking that, because there weren’t many examples. So I would omit things in interviews. I wouldn’t lie, but I really understood that about Ian’s generation.
There’s a melancholy moment in the movie where he says, “I wanted to be in the movies. I didn’t scale the heights.”
What a gorgeous little dream. A young boy goes, “I want to be in the movies.” And then to have that knocked out of you bit by bit. You’re not even going to be seen for the audition. Or, “Are you being a little fruity there?”
Did people tell you not to talk about being gay?
Very well-meaning people said to me, “Just keep that [private] because you’re not obviously gay,” which I often think is such an insult to say to people. “So maybe you can get away with it.” And I was like, OK. And I did that for awhile. But it was so insidious. When audiences think of acting, they think of actors pretending, like you’re putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. So the fact that there was this whole section of gay actors who weren’t allowed to do that is awful. I’m so grateful that I get to do that.
What do you remember about the late ’80s and early ’90s in terms of navigating the AIDS epidemic?
It makes me emotional. It was extraordinary just to to have lived through that time and to be completely abandoned by your government, who wouldn’t even say the name of the illness. When I was a young adult, that’s what I was scared of. If you go for a sexual health screening, you go, “My God, am I going to die?” I remember going into those situations, and with no cause for such concern, feeling like I’m going to be punished for expressing myself in that way, because that’s the way the world was set up.
Let’s get back to Ethel Merman.
Please! [Laughs]
There’s that stanza in “There’s No Business Like Show Business” that goes: “There’s no people like show people / They smile when they are low.” Would you say that sums up the spirit of “Elsinore” about as well as any couplet could?
Yes, it’s so much about the power of community and show people. It’s about show people and smiling and getting on with the show.
When did you first feel that power of community?
Putting on “The Wizard of Oz” in a school play when I was about 10.
What part did you play?
Guess.
Dorothy?
[Laughs] No, a friend of Dorothy. Oh, come on. One more guess.
The Cowardly Lion?
No. The Tin Man. My mom sprayed me silver, in my hair and everything. We had a probably bit of aluminum foil and I had a funnel. I loved it so much. And I remember having a really extraordinary feeling of surprise, knowing the audience was there. For such a shy boy, when I had to do the big number, “If I Only Had a Heart,” it went to another level, better than rehearsal. I suppose the little showman, the little 10-year-old silver showman, came out.
“Obsession,” the indie horror movie written and directed by Curry Barker, has proved to be one of this year’s most successful films. Made for a reported budget of about $750,000, it has earned more than $500 million at the global box office since Focus Features released it in May — the biggest hit in the distributor’s history, according to a new lawsuit.
But one of its producers, Leonora Ann Darby, is claiming she hasn’t received her share of the profit.
Darby, who rose to become one of three producers at Tea Shop Productions, the U.K. company behind the movie, sued Tea Shop, its Delaware affiliate The Tea Shop & Film Company, and co-founders James Harris and Mark Lane in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The 135-page complaint lays out 10 causes of action — among them, breach of contract, retaliation for wage complaints, whistleblower retaliation and unfair competition — and describes a seven-year pattern of “unequal treatment and broken compensation promises.” Darby has demanded a jury trial.
Harris and Lane allegedly treated Darby “as their subordinate, including in a highly demeaning and gendered manner,” and continually refused to compensate her properly, “culminating in ruthlessly cutting Darby out of the overall net profits” for “Obsession,” the lawsuit says.
“Ms. Darby has brought serious and substantial claims, supported by a detailed factual record,” Darby’s lawyer Thomas K. Richards of the Beverly Hills firm Singh, Singh & Trauben, said in a statement. “She is confident in her case and intends to pursue it fully.”
Tea Shop has already rejected the core of her claim. In an Aug. 13 letter attached to the complaint as an exhibit, the company’s lawyer wrote that Darby “was an employee and, subsequently, a consultant” who has never been a member, shareholder or owner of Tea Shop, and therefore has no right to inspect the company’s financial records. The parties’ written agreement, the letter says, does not entitle her to profit participation or collection-account status on “Obsession” or on any other film not previously identified in writing, and she “has been compensated in accordance with the parties’ agreement.” Tea Shop Productions did not respond to a request for comment.
Darby is credited on screen as an executive producer of “Obsession,” rather than as a producer — a decision she says the company made despite Lane’s absence from the production in 2025 and limited involvement with the film. She claims she functioned as a lead producer under Tea Shop’s own internal definition, a distinction at the center of the case, because the profit deal she is suing over applies only to films she lead-produced.
The complaint alleges that she stepped in at a point when the edit had been taken away from Barker and handed to a new editor, leaving the movie “mired in an edit that was not working.” She “provided fundamental and critical creative and structural notes that changed the course of the film,” “advocated heavily” for the edit to be returned to Barker, and recommended the reshoots that followed, according to the suit. She then took on the post-production, credits, clearance and delivery work that got the film finished in time for its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, where Focus bought it for about $16.2 million — well above the $14 million to $15 million that trades were reporting during negotiations.
Once the value of the movie became apparent, the lawsuit alleges, she was iced out. She wasn’t invited to the Los Angeles premiere and was “deliberately” cut out of major trade articles and interviews, the suit says, including a May profile of Harris and Lane that didn’t name her. Her name was added to that piece in August, after she complained.
Darby first started working at the company in 2019, as a development and production executive. In this role, the lawsuit said, she was responsible for originating and developing projects, attaching filmmakers, assembling financing and producing films from preproduction through delivery. She originated and produced movies including “A Banquet,” “Tornado” and “The Surfer,” which stars Nicolas Cage.
In 2024, she and Tea Shop allegedly reached an agreement raising her salary to 100,000 pounds and entitling her to a third of the net profits Tea Shop itself receives on films she lead-produced, “together with direct participation in the applicable collection account management agreements” — the deals that govern how money from a film is divided among its participants.
Tea Shop has allegedly honored that arrangement on other films. On “Obsession,” the complaint says, Darby was paid $300,000 out of the film’s initial minimum guarantee after Tea Shop directed her company, Runt Productions, to invoice for “Services: Obsession.” That payment, the suit argues, was fixed compensation for her producing services — not a settlement, release or buyout, with no writing calling it full and final.
In addition to her share of Tea Shop’s profits on “Obsession,” Darby is seeking a full accounting for several projects as well as unpaid wages, expenses and relief for retaliation.
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday urged Congress to approve federal tax incentives aimed at reviving American film and television productions, saying Hollywood has been hollowed out by productions moving to Canada and other countries.
In a social media post, Trump said he met with actor Jon Voight, whom he has designated as “Hollywood Ambassador,” and concluded there is “no incentive” to work in Hollywood anymore and that it is “hurting California very badly.”
“Jon, and many others in the Industry, are suggesting we do Federal Tax Incentives in order to Make our Movie and Television Production Business GREAT AGAIN, Perhaps GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE!,” Trump said wrote on Truth Social.
Trump said meetings are already being set up to talk to lawmakers from both parties, noting that he wants to the discussions to be bipartisan, “especially since so much money is being lost in California, and other largely Blue States.”
“I am going to suggest that Republicans and Democrats get together, and immediately craft Legislation to save the Movie, Television and Entertainment Business in America,” he said.
There are few details about what these incentives would look like at this time, but Trump said “the amount of money spent” on tax breaks will be made up “tenfold by the money pouring into the Treasury’s coffers.”
Charles Rivkin, chairman and chief executive of the Motion Picture Assn., applauded Trump’s announcement, and, in a statement, added that “for over a century, American studios, casts, and crews have produced the films and series that the world wants to see.”
“A federal incentive,” Rivkin added, “would be a landmark step toward bringing more production to local communities in all 50 states, strengthening our nation’s economy, and making our country a more competitive place to produce, create, and tell great stories.”
Trump’s push comes as production has continued to shift overseas. Last year, 45% of all U.S. films and scripted television shows were shot internationally, up from about 33% in 2022, an issue that has worried California lawmakers such as Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
California and other states have bolstered their production incentive programs, but Schiff has said in the past that it is not enough. He, too, has made the case for a federal tax credit.
“State programs cannot simply substitute for the kind of global, federal and competitive tax incentives that are needed to bring production back to American soil and stop its offshoring,” Schiff said at an event in March. “The urgency could not be greater.”
Trump has previously floated more aggressive measures, including a threat to impose tariffs on foreign-made films, but that idea did not gain traction.
