Creative Space
‘Tiny Beautiful Things” Liz Tigelaar Talks About the Tightrope Walk of TV Adaptations
When writer Liz Tigelaar isn’t on set, in her Fox lot bungalow office or at the Venice home she shares with her wife, their 7-year-old son and two French bulldogs, she occasionally relaxes at (and, yes, works from) one of the tonier trailer parks on the planet: Malibu’s Paradise Cove. That’s where she’s shared a […]
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‘Yellowjackets’ Creators Get Real on Season 2 Pressure, Showtime Tumult and Spinoffs: “We Have a Couple of Ideas”
When Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson first moved to Los Angeles, working as a dog walker and P.F. Chang’s bartender, respectively, the native New Jersey couple liked to splurge on dinner and drinks at Tam O’Shanter — the 100-year-old Scottish house of prime rib in Atwater Village. These days, however, it’s where they go to […]
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‘John Wick’ Filmmaker Chad Stahelski Talks Sequels, Oscar Stunt Snubs and Why Guns Still Show Up on Sets
Few, if any, stunt doubles go on to direct their A-list counterparts in a string of blockbusters, but that’s been the curious trajectory of Chad Stahelski. The exceptionally fit filmmaker, who stood in for Keanu Reeves in the first Matrix movie before becoming the trilogy’s martial arts coordinator, has now collaborated with the star for […]
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Ike Barinholtz on Having “7 Side Hustles” and the Truth About Cancel Culture
“Make sure you put the things that will get me canceled right up in the headline,” Ike Barinholtz jokes in early February as I leave the Los Angeles home he shares with his wife and three daughters. We’ve just spent the past hour-plus talking about everything from casting to cancel culture in the guest house […]
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‘Your Place or Mine’ Filmmaker Talks Rom-Com Must-Haves: Chemistry and Star Power
Soon after wrapping four seasons of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the cult CW musical that saw her segue from screenwriter to showrunner, Aline Brosh McKenna decided to revisit her past before turning her attention to the future. She rented the garden apartment in the same Larchmont-adjacent duplex she and her now-husband shared during the mid-’90s, not too […]
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Howard Gordon on Fox Panic Over New Show ‘Accused,’ Making More ‘24’ and Being “A Writer of a Certain Age”
Howard Gordon has spent much of the pandemic consumed by his latest thriller, an anthology series titled Accused. The weekly collection of topical stories, where viewers come in knowing nothing about the featured crime or how the defendant ended up on trial, has him back at Fox — home to his earlier entries The X-Files […]
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Octavia Spencer on Knowing Her Worth and ‘Truth Be Told’ Season 3
An Oscar-winning actress with a perennially full plate, Octavia Spencer has earned the right to be jaded. But after more than two decades in the business, Spencer remains unabashedly enthusiastic about her job and, more telling, the work of her peers. “This is not something to be taken for granted,” she says in late December, […]
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‘Friday Night Lights’ Director Peter Berg on the Power of Football and His Long-Simmering Rihanna Doc
Peter Berg didn’t know how to respond to the 2020 murder of George Floyd. It was not the Minneapolis that the filmmaker, a graduate of Saint Paul’s Macalester College, thought he knew. Eventually, he turned to football, as he had before in his career — following the predominantly Black players at the city’s North Community […]
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Jim Parsons Embraces Being a “Late Bloomer”
Jim Parsons is learning to like control. For nearly his entire career, the actor best known for a 12-season run starring on The Big Bang Theory has been almost exclusively invested in delivering the best performances possible. Even after one of those massive deals to stay put at the late sitcom birthed a shingle, That’s […]
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‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ Filmmakers on Netflix’s High-Stakes Rollout and the Lessons of ‘Star Wars’
Writer-director Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman, his producing partner of two decades, are improbably modest for a pair who made one of the biggest film deals in recent memory — a $469 million two-picture pact with Netflix to have their T-Street production shingle make two sequels to their 2019 whodunit Knives Out. It’s not just […]
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Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon Love Working Together — Just Not All The Time
Couples who work together navigate the dance between personal and professional in a variety of ways. For Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani — the married duo who earned an Oscar nomination for their original screenplay for The Big Sick in 2018 — the lines are clearly drawn. “There are office hours, Monday through Friday,” […]
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Liz Feldman Discusses Letting Go of ‘Dead to Me’
Since the beginning of her career, showrunner Liz Feldman has been laser-focused on making people laugh. A teenage stand-up, she joined The Groundlings after college and worked for mentor Ellen DeGeneres before writing on a string of traditional broadcast sitcoms. But with Dead to Me, her Netflix comedy-mystery with a high character mortality rate, Feldman’s […]
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