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From building 14 blocks of ancient Rome and filling it with 2,000 extras for Gladiator II to ensuring Sing Sing‘s cast of formerly incarcerated actors was comfortable shooting in a prison, the producers behind this year’s best picture contenders had to navigate everything from the Arabian Desert to nervous studio executives.

Lucy Fisher (Gladiator II), Mary Parent (Dune: Part Two), Amy Pascal (Challengers), Samantha Quan (Anora), Tessa Ross (Conclave) and Monique Walton (Sing Sing) came together in Los Angeles for The Hollywood Reporter‘s annual Producer Roundtable to talk about getting stuck in mud (literally) while sticking it out in Hollywood. Says Parent, “So many people are driven by fear right now. Everyone’s jumping ship. As a producer, you can never jump ship.”

What did your first job as a Hollywood producer entail?

Mary Parent It was one of the few movies that I had the luxury of shooting in Los Angeles.

Ken Loach says he has “great respect” for Jonathan Glazer in raising the subject of Gaza in his Oscars acceptance speech for “The Zone of Interest,” asserting that the director was “very brave” to say what he did. “And I’m sure he understood the possible consequences, which makes him braver still, so I’ve got great respect for him and his work,” he tells Variety.

The veteran filmmaker and campaigner is speaking ahead of the U.S. release of “The Old Oak,” a feature that also happens to be his last. After a career of more than 60 years, the British director — a two-time Palme d’Or winner who is behind a library of beloved films including “Kes,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” “Land and Freedom,” “Sweet Sixteen,” “My Name is Joe” and “I, Daniel Blake” — is calling it a day.

Loach has announced his retirement before, of course,...

Neal Jimenez, a screenwriter and filmmaker whose credits include “River’s Edge” and “The Waterdance,” died of heart failure on Dec. 11 in Arroyo Grande, Calif. He was 62. His works were favorites on the awards circuit, attracting wins in screenwriting categories at ceremonies such as the Independent Spirit Awards and the Sundance Film Festival.

Jimenez wrote and co-directed “The Waterdance” with director Michael Steinberg, and alongside the recognition the film received on the awards circuit in 1993, the autobiographical film was included in the book “The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.” He shared writing credits on five other films: “Where the River Runs Black,” “For the Boys,” “The Dark Wind,” “Sleep With Me” and “Hideaway.”

For more than a decade, he was a sought-after script doctor in Hollywood, being commissioned to write scripts for Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Wolfgang Peterson, Atom Egoyan, Robert Redford, Madonna, Tom Hanks and many others.

Directors interested in important, ambitious subject matter didn’t all go extinct with the rise of the Star Wars Generation. Roland Joffé’s first four features are powerful pictures that tell truths that we ought not to forget, with a couple of Award-winning gems right up front. The star power is here as well — Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, Patrick Swayze. The deluxe collector’s box caps a presentation with new extras for each title: The Killing Fields, The Mission, Fat Man and Little Boy and City of Joy.

Directed by Roland Joffé

Region-Free Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator 194, 185, 186, 187

1984 – 1992 / Color / Street Date December 7, 2022 / 525 minutes cumulative / Available from / au 179.95

Starring: Sam Waterston, Dr. Haing S. Ngor, John Malkovich; Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons; Paul Newman, Dwight Schultz, Bonnie Bedelia, John Cusack; Patrick Swayze, Om Puri, Pauline Collins.

Cinematography: Chris Menges (2); Vilmos Zsigmond, Peter Biziou

Original Music: Mike Oldfield, Ennio Morricone (3)

Written by Bruce Robinson; Robert Bolt; Bruce Robinson,...

Welcome to this week’s International Insider. Max Goldbart here bringing you the latest in what’s been a busy seven days in the world of international TV and film.

Sundance Global

Cha Cha Leo Grande: This year’s virtual Sundance Film Festival draws to a close on Sunday and hopefully avid Deadline readers have been keeping abreast of our U.S. team’s fantastic coverage of all the biggest deals, reviews and hits. Some big international offerings have been making an impact over in the States and our own Mike Fleming Junior had two fantastic scoops on Wednesday, first revealing that Searchlight Pictures had closed a circa-$7.5M deal for U.S. rights to Emma Thompson pic Good Luck To You, Leo Grande and, hours later, telling the world about Apple’s global $15M grab for Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth, starring Dakota Johnson. Searchlight won out...

Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week, we present Simon Heath, World Productions CEO and exec producer of Line of Duty, the biggest UK TV drama of the decade.

Line of Duty, Vigil and The Pembrokeshire Murders. The three most-watched dramas in the UK last year were all united by one common denominator: World Productions.

By World’s own standards, the ITV Studios-backed drama powerhouse had a phenomenal year during what was a difficult 12 months for the industry, with Covid never far from the mind and a highly-publicized skills crisis making TV production trickier than ever.

“You couldn’t really ask for more than having the biggest shows on BBC1 and ITV,” Heath tells Deadline during a rare in-person interview at his Central London offices, although...

“I was given a piece of advice by legendary British television producer and filmmaker Tony Garnett,” remembers “The Power of the Dog” producer Tanya Seghatchian. “Tony said to me, trust taste. The only thing that matters is your taste. Have it, stick to it, and one day you’ll be called upon to actually stand by it and deliver it.” Seghatchian joined our “Meet the Experts” Film Producers Panel along with Todd Black (“Being the Ricardos”), Tamar Thomas (“Belfast”), and Julie Oh to discuss lessons they’ve learned in their field and more. Watch our group roundtable discussion above. Click each name above to watch that person’s individual interview.

Black agrees with Seghatchian and adds that up-and-coming producers should “find a piece of material” they’re passionate about, a story that would excite them to tell, whether it’s “from a local newspaper in a little tiny town that you grew up in,...

Garnett also worked on Earth Girls Are Easy and seminal TV drama Cathy Come Home.

Tony Garnett, the film and television producer behind Ken Loach’s breakthrough features, has died aged 83.

The British producer collaborated with Loach from 1965 to 1979 on films including Kes, Family Life and Black Jack as well as seminal TV drama Cathy Come Home.

World Productions, the company he co-founded in 1990, said in a statement: “After a short illness, Tony Garnett, the legendary TV and film producer… died around midday on January 12. Tony was a great man and an inspirational producer who will be sorely missed by everyone who knew him.

British film and TV producer Tony Garnett, founder of “Bodyguard” producer World Productions, died Sunday at the age of 83.

His death was confirmed by the ITV Studios-backed World Productions, which released the following statement Sunday night: “After a short illness, Tony Garnett, the legendary TV and film producer and founder of World Productions, died around midday on January 12. Tony was a great man and an inspirational producer who will be sorely missed by everyone who knew him.”

The Birmingham, U.K.-born Garnett began his career as an actor in the 1960s before going on to produce TV movies such as “Cathy Come Home” and “Kes” with “I, Daniel Blake” director Ken Loach – a frequent collaborator.

His work was known for a hard-nosed social realism that tackled issues such as homelessness and abortion.

Garnett worked in Hollywood in the 1980s, where he produced films such as “Earth Girls Are Easy,...

Tony Garnett, founder of Bodyguard and Line of Duty producer World Productions and regular collaborator of Ken Loach, died Sunday at 83.

The news was confirmed in a statement from World, the company he founded in 1990.

“After a short illness, Tony Garnett, the legendary TV & Film Producer and founder of World Productions, died around midday on January 12. Tony was a great man and an inspirational producer who will be sorely missed by everyone who knew him,” World Productions said.

Garnett produced series including BBC dramas This Life and Between the Lines and worked with British director Loach on films including Kes and Cathy Come Home.

He was celebrated Sunday by a number of figures in the British TV industry including Good Omens director Douglas McKinnon, who called Garnett a “remarkable person.”

Bodyguard creator Jed Mercurio said: “Very sad to hear of Tony Garnett’s death. Tony was instrumental in giving me...

When describing her approach to mentoring, film producer and former Sony Pictures chair Amy Pascal pointed to Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw’s 1986 picture book about child rearing, “Love You Forever.”

“First, you do it because you believe in somebody, then you hope they don’t ever call you again because that means they’re doing fine. Sort of like when your kid goes to college,” she said in a conversation on Thursday with DeVon Franklin, a producer, author, preacher — and also a former mentee of Pascal’s. “You invest in people and you help them become everything they want to be and if it works out right, when you’re at another point in your life, they can help you.”

Speaking at TheWrap’s Be Conference in Santa Monica, Pascal said that mentoring was a lot like the book’s description of the full circle of parenthood, where the...

Interview by Matthew Edwards

Tony Garnett is one of the most respected and celebrated British filmmakers of his generation having worked extensively in British television and through his work with critically acclaimed filmmakers such as Ken Loach, whom the pair worked together on the seminal British dramas Kes (1969) and Cathy Come Home (1966), both of which Garnett produced. Opting to move away from producing, Garnett set his sights on writing and directing his own feature films. After directing the critically acclaimed drama Prostitute (1980), Garnett went on to the write and direct the film Handgun (1983), a powerful cult rape and revenge thriller. Eschewing the exploitation motifs as explored in the genre titles such as Death Wish (1974), Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), favouring an art-house aesthetic and employing a docudrama stylistic approach, Garnett’s film is a measured exploration of the nature of injustice and retribution while a...

Simon Brew Sep 2, 2016

Premiere magazine highlighted 10 movie executives to watch in 1990. So what happened to them?

In its May 1990 issue, the sadly-missed Us version of Premiere magazine published an article, highlighting ten young movie executives, and suggesting that these were people with very big futures ahead of them in the industry.

Given that much is written about movie executives, without actually digging much deeper to find out who they actually are, I thought it was worth tracing what happened to these ten, and – 26 years later – whether Premiere was correct in saluting them as the future of the industry. So, er, I did...

Lance Young

Senior production VP, Paramount Pictures

Pictured in the article on an office swivel chair with some snazzy purple socks, Lance Young, Premiere wrote, had been “groomed for big things since joining Paramount at the age of 23”. He was 30 at the time the article was published, and...

★★★☆☆ Coming hot on the heels of his Palme d'Or triumph I, Daniel Blake, Louise Osmond's biographical documentary of Ken Loach Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach couldn't have been more timely and it is a fitting if suitably modest and workmanlike survey of the radical left wing filmmaker and his impressive body of work from almost fifty years of filmmaking. An impressive array of colleagues, actors and producers, as well as family members and friends line up to give an account of a man who friend and producer Tony Garnett calls "The most subversive left wing filmmaker England has ever had" while at the same time commenting on his conservatism, his love of 18th century architecture and how "he'd be at home at a vicar's tea party."...

Louise Osmond’s documentary is an engrossing study of this mild-mannered giant of British social realism

Louise Osmond’s documentary tribute to Ken Loach could not have been better timed. His powerful, simple new movie, I, Daniel Blake, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and underlined a colossal international reputation. It’s an engrossing study of this gentle, mild-mannered director with a core of steely determination, who made his bones (as they say in Hollywood) in the BBC of the 1960s, which gave a new generation of working-class writers and film-makers their chance. This has excellent contributions from Tony Garnett and Alan Parker, though it could have given more space to the late Barry Hines, the novelist and screenwriter with whom Loach worked on Kes and other films. Loach emerges as diffident and almost donnish in interviews, although his uncuddly side is revealed in his continuing anger about the...

After his triumphant Palme d’Or win at this year’s Cannes film festival, a new documentary is looking back on the vast career of the acclaimed British film-maker. In this clip, his friend and producer Tony Garnett and Loach himself talk about their early attempts to shake up the BBC.

Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach is in UK cinemas on 3 June.

Continue reading...

Simon Beaufoy and Tony Garnett among team behind spy series ripped from the headlines.

Slumdog Millionaire writer Simon Beaufoy is among the writing team on a new TV drama series about the real-life UK police spies who infiltrated British activist groups and the women with whom they had long-term relationships.

Currently in development, Undercovers (4 x 1hr) is being written by Beaufoy, McLibel and The Age of Stupid director Franny Armstrong and activist-turned-writer Alice Nutter (The Street).

Armstrong’s London-based doc specialist Spanner Films produces and is raising money for the series through crowdfunding.

Tony Garnett, acclaimed veteran producer of film and TV dramas including Kes and Cathy Come Home, will come out of retirement to act as executive producer alongside Passion Pictures’ John Battsek (Searching for Sugar Man, One Day in September).

Storylines on Undercovers include that of activist Helen Steel who discovered, after a two-decade-long search, that her missing partner was in fact a police spy who...

Stars: Karen Young, Clayton Day, Suzie Humphreys, Helena Humann, Ben Jones | Written and Directed by Tony Garrett

With one broken relationship still fresh in her mind, Kathleen Sullivan (Young) is in no mood to take on a new boyfriend. Larry (Day) however will not tolerate sexual rebuffs; rape is his means of exercising what he regards as a male prerogative. Consumed by anger and hungry for vengeance, Kathleen now finds she must take matters into her own hands.

The film debut of Karen Young, who would later go on to star in Birdy, Daylight and The Sopranos, is an uncompromising look at America’s hand gun culture through the eyes of a school teacher coming to terms with being raped. Helmed by British director Tony Garnett in the heart of Texas using a mix of actors and local people, Handgun is unlike any other rape/revenge thriller that has come before or since…...

This period of economic hardship hasn't brought about the predicted burst of creativity – instead it's More of the Same

It's said there are only seven master plots in fiction (or five, or 20, depending on who's counting). But at the current rate of rehash, scientists predict there will be only seven master franchises come 2025. These will include: Spiderman (played by a different 26-year-old every three years); that thing with Vin Diesel and the cars (Fast and Forty-fourious will see the gang of ageing speedsters pull off a heist on mobility scooters); and any amount of spun-off Star Wars characters (to be tired of Boba Fett's backstory is to be tired of life). Oh, and Poldark.

Poldark's back, in case you missed the news, or perhaps assumed the reports had wormed through some tear in the commissioning continuum from 1996, which is the last time the 18th-century Cornish romantic saga was revived.

Producer who edited Ken Loach's 1965 TV drama about illegal abortion reveals own mother died two days after operation

The story editor of Up the Junction, the groundbreaking 1960s BBC drama dealing with backstreet abortion, has talked publicly for the first time of the personal tragedy that motivated him to get this and other politically challenging work on screen.

Tony Garnett, 77, the veteran TV and film producer with credits ranging from Kes and Cathy Come Home to This Life, revealed to the Guardian that his mother died of septicaemia, two days after a backstreet abortion during the German bombing of British cities in the second world war.

Garnett, then a child of five, was in bed with his mother the night she died. His father, who worked as a munitions worker, committed suicide less than a month later.

"There was me and my little brother and [my parents] thought another baby in those circumstances too much.

As the BFI celebrates his 50 years' work, the man behind Cathy Come Home reveals the tragedy that changed his world

Television has treated Tony Garnett well over the past 50 years. He lives in an apartment close to the Ritz Hotel, where Margaret Thatcher died, a far cry from his working class childhood roots in Erdington, Birmingham. His local cafe is Fortnum & Mason, where he wields a silver teapot with aplomb, but he still declares: "I am a revolutionary socialist. I think our society would benefit from fundamental change."

Charming, kindly, but still angry after all these years, Garnett, 77, was a leader of the generation of radical TV creatives who addressed big social and political issues in their influential BBC dramas of the 1960s and 70s. His work is about to be celebrated in a two-month season, Seeing Red, at London's BFI.

The season opens with his explosive dramas for the BBC's Wednesday Play,...

Winning an Oscar is a life-changing event, even as we all acknowledge how silly it all seems. When Simon Beaufoy, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Slumdog Millionaire discusses his craft, one tends to listen. I was afforded such an opportunity recently, as Simon sat down with myself and a few other journalists to discuss his latest film, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, his directorial past and future ambitions, the daunting task of adapting Catching Fire, the second book in The Hunger Games series, and his next possible project with director Slumdog and 127 Hours helmer Danny Boyle. The following is a transcript of interview questions asked by myself and other journalists at a recent roundtable session with the writer.

So this project, you adapted from the book, and the book is written in a very unconventional style.

It’s an epistolary novel, like Dracula.

A lot of people look at a...

BFI Southbank is marking the director's 75th birthday with the unveiling of his controversial 1969 documentary, which the children's charity funded but then wanted banned

This month, BFI Southbank in London marks Ken Loach's 75th birthday, and his 50 years in the business, with a colossal new retrospective. The centre-piece is perhaps the unveiling of his "lost" 1969 television documentary, partly bankrolled by the Save the Children charity. It is an exhilarating experience. Perhaps Loach scholars will come to see it as an early, brutalist masterpiece, uncompromisingly angry and disdainful.

Never in the history of documentary film-making was the feeding hand bitten so spectacularly, so gloriously. To say that the Save the Children charity come badly out of the film, which they themselves had bankrolled, was the understatement of 1969, or any year. After a ferocious legal row, Save the Children actually demanded Loach's film be banned. Loach and his producer Tony Garnett...

The actors, producers, directors and crew of the Harry Potter series tell Ryan Gilbey the inside story of the defining film franchise of the last decade

Tanya Seghatchian, co-producer/executive producer, Harry Potter 1-4: I started working with David Heyman at Heyday Films in 1997. We had a deal with Warner Bros to be the eyes and ears of the studio in the UK. I remember a friend of mine, Tony Garnett, who produced Kes, saying to me: "Listen, this deal will only last if you find Warners the equivalent of the Bond franchise." I read an article on a book that was due to be published, about a boy who discovers he's a wizard. It said it was going to be one in a series – so that's a franchise. I rang Christopher Little, Jo Rowling's agent, to introduce myself and win him over if I could.

David Heyman, producer,...

The actors, producers, directors and crew of the Harry Potter series tell Ryan Gilbey the inside story of the defining film franchise of the last decade

Tanya Seghatchian, co-producer/executive producer, Harry Potter 1-4: I started working with David Heyman at Heyday Films in 1997. We had a deal with Warner Bros to be the eyes and ears of the studio in the UK. I remember a friend of mine, Tony Garnett, who produced Kes, saying to me: "Listen, this deal will only last if you find Warners the equivalent of the Bond franchise." I read an article on a book that was due to be published, about a boy who discovers he's a wizard. It said it was going to be one in a series – so that's a franchise. I rang Christopher Little, Jo Rowling's agent, to introduce myself and win him over if I could.

David Heyman, producer,...

The actors, producers, directors and crew of the Harry Potter series tell Ryan Gilbey the inside story of the defining film franchise of the last decade

Tanya Seghatchian, co-producer/executive producer, Harry Potter 1-4: I started working with David Heyman at Heyday Films in 1997. We had a deal with Warner Bros to be the eyes and ears of the studio in the UK. I remember a friend of mine, Tony Garnett, who produced Kes, saying to me: "Listen, this deal will only last if you find Warners the equivalent of the Bond franchise." I read an article on a book that was due to be published, about a boy who discovers he's a wizard. It said it was going to be one in a series – so that's a franchise. I rang Christopher Little, Jo Rowling's agent, to introduce myself and win him over if I could.

David Heyman, producer,...

"It's not uncommon for movies to drop out of circulation and simply disappear, as fans of Deep End will attest," begins Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian. "Barely seen since its release in 1971, the film concerns Mike (played by John Moulder-Brown), a floppy-fringed 15-year-old who becomes dangerously infatuated with Susan (Jane Asher), his co-worker at the public baths. What's unusual about this prolonged absence is that it should have befallen a film so passionately admired. The influential critic Andrew Sarris thought it measured up to the best of Godard, Truffaut and Polanski. The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt called it 'a work of peculiar, cock-a-hoop gifts.' If something as venerated as Deep End can sink, what hope for the rest of cinema?"

Some, at least. After all, Jerzy Skolimowski's film, kept off screens for decades due to rights issues, has been restored and will screen tomorrow night at London's BFI Southbank,...

Kes Quick Thoughts:

Just who is Ken Loach? What are his films about? Why is he so highly regarded? Honestly, I can't answer these questions without any great amount of knowledge, but after watching Criterion's treatment of Loach's second feature film, Kes, I'm beginning to have a greater understanding of the man and why Loach has remained a director appreciated by many since the mid-1960s.

Last year at the Cannes Film Festival I saw my first Ken Loach film, Route Irish. Kes was my second, and considering the British Film Institute named it the seventh best British film of the century my expectations were quite high.

To begin with, you are most likely going to want to turn on the subtitles for this one. The Yorkshire accents are so strong in the opening scene I couldn't understand a word. Things improve as you go along, but the dialect adds to the difficulty.

HollywoodNews.com: Sony Corporation of America has extended Amy Pascal’s employment agreement with Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Pascal is Co-Chairman of Sony Pictures, and together with Michael Lynton, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, they are responsible for overseeing all lines of business for the studio, including motion pictures (Columbia Pictures, Screen Gems and TriStar Pictures), worldwide television production and distribution, home entertainment, and digital productions (Imageworks and Sony Pictures Animation).

So far this year, the studio’s successful slate of films has generated more than $2 billion in worldwide box office revenues. Since 2000, Sony Pictures has had 73 movies open to #1 at the domestic box office, more than any other studio.

Since becoming partners seven years ago, Lynton and Pascal are among the most seasoned, respected and accomplished management teams in the industry today, providing consistent and stable leadership to Sony Pictures and more than 6,000 employees worldwide. Pascal has been with the...

Actor best known for his role as one of the Italian Job gang

Frank Jarvis, who has died suddenly aged 69, was a prolific actor with a particular commitment to theatre. He did, however, have a minor claim to film immortality as one of the gang of cockney villains, led by Michael Caine, who pull off a robbery, but do not quite get away with it, in The Italian Job (1969). Greeted upon its initial release as merely one of many caper movies (a view that persists in the Us), repeated television screenings in Britain have given it status as a minor classic.

Jarvis's role was as a getaway driver, well-dressed and continually smoking. It was representative of his screen work during the 60s and 70s, which almost always centred on crime, whether he was cast as crook or copper. He was thin-faced and slim of build, with dark hair slicked down by Brylcreem,...

Cinematographer who honed his style on Ken Loach's innovative TV dramas

The cinematographer Tony Imi, who has died aged 72, was instrumental in pioneering a new style of filming television drama in the 1960s, before he moved on to feature films. Few could forget the misfortunes that befell a homeless young couple and their children in Cathy Come Home, a programme that shocked the nation and was instrumental in the formation of the charity Shelter.

Imi's handheld camera, on the move and close up to the action, made the story chillingly real, in the vein of a current affairs programme, rather than fiction. Cathy Come Home, screened as part of the groundbreaking Wednesday Play series by the BBC in 1966, proved that TV drama could be relevant to the lives of people in Britain.

The director, Ken Loach, was in the early days of establishing his method of social-realist film-making – shooting...