Of all the journalists who covered the dramatic ups and downs of late night television this year, only one has made the genre his journalistic purview. Reacquaint yourselves with Bill Carter: New York Times media reporter, bestselling author of The Late Shift and the authority on late night. In spite of the tens of thousands of headlines already devoted to Conan, Leno and Letterman in 2010, the late night industry is still relatively small, with a handful of hosts, a few hundred employees and several tightly guarded doors. As evidenced by his definitive book about the battle over Johnny Carson's crown, Carter is the only person with complete access to this cutthroat world. In anticipation of his upcoming chronicle, The War For Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy, which will be published in September, Movieline picked Carter's brain about another HBO adaptation, a potential Tonight Showdown at the Emmys and the reason why Conan might contribute to the collapse of late night.
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Friday Night Lights has always has passionate fans, but over the last few weeks, their fervor has been updated for the Facebook age. It's due in large part to Zach Gilford's shattering performance in the recent episode "The Son," which found his character Matt Saracen grappling with his hated father's death. Perhaps inspired by the grassroots activism that landed Betty White on Saturday Night Live, the website PopEater launched an unofficial Emmy campaign for Gilford (he'd be nominated in the guest actor category, since he went from regular to recurring this past season) and now it's become a surging Facebook petition that's brought a spotlight back to the acclaimed but underseen series.
As he films an arc of episodes for the show's fifth (and presumed-to-be final) season, Gilford rang Movieline to talk about filming the tough episode, the things we didn't see, and what the FNL series finale will (and won't) have in common with the final episode of lost.
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Long before Justin Halpern launched the Twitter feed Sh*t My Dad Says to catalog his father's cranky observations about life, the writer spent five years waiting tables at the Crocodile Cafe in Pasadena. At that point in his struggling writing career, the recent New York Times bestselling author cites the time that he served sparkling water to Home Improvement co-star Richard Karn as the most exciting moment of his life. Since then, Halpern moved back into his parents' house in San Diego, accumulated over a million Twitter followers, wrote a book, moved to Los Angeles and created a network sitcom starring William Shatner that premieres in September.
Earlier this week, Justin Halpern phoned Movieline to discuss his whirlwind success, his Twitter technique and the sh*t his dad says about his CBS series.
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In the new comedy Cyrus, Jonah Hill and John C. Reilly may have the showiest roles, but Marisa Tomei has the trickiest. While Hill (as her son) and Reilly (as her suitor) spar for her affections, Tomei has to make her Molly attractive but attainable, naive but not stupid, and loving but fundamentally misguided. Those are a whole lot of contradictions to play for any actor, but as Tomei explains it, it was all part of the process of working with directors Jay and Mark Duplass. The pair encourage the actors to make not just the characters but the dialogue and blocking their own, and Academy Award winner Tomei had plenty of ideas on how to do exactly that.
The actress talked to Movieline this week about some of the challenges inherent in that process, how she reconceived the character counter to what the Duplasses had originally intended, and how Hollywood has a problem with allowing women be funny.
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Over the course of three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has transformed his protagonist from a spineless husband and chemistry teacher into a cold-hearted meth chemist who neglects his family in order to churn out hundreds of pounds of lethal crystal for cash. The role, born somewhere deep in Gilligan's subconscious, won star Bryan Cranston back-to-back Emmys, and tied together three seasons of one of the best (and darkest) dramas on television today. Gilligan himself, though, could not be any more different than the grim world and characters he created.
In anticipation of this Sunday's season finale, the native Virginian -- who also wrote and produced over 30 episodes of The X Files and penned the Will Smith blockbuster Hancock -- phoned Movieline to cheerfully talk about the nuttiest scene he ever wrote for Walt (that never made it to air), the encouragement of AMC, and the possibility of renewing Breaking Bad for a fifth season.
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True Blood is one of television's most audacious shows, and it has Ryan Kwanten to thank for helping to set the tone. Sure, the 33-year-old Aussie's role as Jason Stackhouse requires him to go nude a lot -- and in the third season, premiering this Sunday, he's back to his old tricks right away -- but he can't just be credited for the fact that he helped establish the show's sexual daring. What the new episodes confirm more than ever is that Kwanten is the funniest person on the show, and he's able to pull off his dimwitted character without ever once winking at the audience. There are times that True Blood veers close to knowing self-parody, but Kwanten's smart enough to play those lines like Jason has no idea.
On the eve of the season premiere, Kwanten called Movieline to discuss working with series creator Alan Ball, True Blood's habit of splitting its characters up, and the healthy state of Australian film.
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At the Sundance film festival this year, Debra Granik's Ozark drama Winter's Bone was one of the most buzzed-about titles, earning plaudits for its impressively conjured setting and riveting cast. We've already brought you a Verge interview with Jennifer Lawrence, who plays the film's lead Ree, but as Winter's Bone goes into limited release this weekend, here's more about the movie from some of the people who know it best: Granik, John Hawkes (who almost walks away with the film as Ree's fearsome uncle Teardrop), and Dale Dickey (who plays the stubborn, implacable mountain woman Merab).
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Like every other twenty-something, Stephanie Pratt has fought to overcome her own insecurities. Only unlike the masses, she did so as part of MTV's cultural phenomenon The Hills. Her journey was especially sophisticated for a reality show that specializes in glamorous simplification -- picture-perfect young cast members, glistening shots of the L.A. cityscape and conversations that rarely delve into complex designer names, let alone emotions. But as The Hills winds down its final season, Stephanie -- who became a lead cast member this year -- has emerged as of one of the show's most integral and reliable characters.
Last week, Stephanie phoned Movieline to discuss the career detour that took her to The Hills , the one cast member she trusts for advice and her strained relationship with her brother.
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Perhaps the only endeavor more difficult than saving post-Katrina New Orleans was creating a television series that intimately captured the perspective of the disaster-torn city. But that is exactly what Steve Zahn and the ensemble cast of HBO's freshman series Treme have done under the guidance of The Wire's David Simon and Eric Overmyer. Zahn portrays a passionate disc jockey and musician whose frustration with the Big Easy's snail-like rebuilding pace leads to brilliant anti-administration country songs and random displays of passive-aggressive rage. As the series nears the end of its freshman season, Zahn phoned Movieline yesterday from his Kentucky farm to discuss his transition into television, his hope that Treme will cover the BP oil spill and the one biopic he'd love to headline.
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If you are a fan of little girls committing big, gory acts of violence, then you should check out Shannen Doherty's latest project, the animated web series Mari-Kari premiering tomorrow on FEARnet. The anime-inspired project splits Doherty -- who just this year, returned to the 90210 zip code and competed as a celebrity contestant on Dancing with the Stars -- into identical twins Mari and Kari. The latter is a ghost who goes to great lengths to protect her bubbly, optimistic sister Mari from bullies at school. And as Doherty explained to Movieline last week, tapping into her "saccharine sweet" side is enough to give the actress a major headache.
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George A. Romero may not be the father of the zombie film, but there can be no denying his status as its patron saint. More than four decades after his still-searing Night of the Living Dead put the "gory" in "allegory," Romero returns today with Survival of the Dead -- a grisly, pitch-black satire about the ordeal of an increasingly polarized society. Except this time it's the living facing each other as two families -- the O'Flynns and the Muldoons -- battle for control of an island where zombies co-exist like pets. Hungry pets, sure, but maybe even trainable. This could change everything.
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Cat Deeley's hosting gig on So You Think You Can Dance acquaints her with talents who want a quick rise to stardom, but her beginnings in TV happened just as swiftly. The 33-year-old star landed an on-air job in her native UK after sending one self-made audition tape to MTV. That job led to countless others, including hosting duties on Brit reality series The Record of the Year and Reach for the Stars. Now that she emcees the US and UK versions of So You Think You Can Dance, Deeley seems poised for a universal takeover. Ahead of SYTYCD's seventh season premiere tonight on Fox, Deeley spoke with Movieline about her academic past, Emmy aspirations, and how the show will be different without Mary Murphy as a permanent judge.
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This week's sweeping epic Agora is a bit of a headscratcher -- not necessarily for its concentration on the bloody collision of religion, science, romance and politics in 4th-century Alexandria, but instead for the fact that a film so serious and substantial wasn't itself made extinct somewhere along the development pipeline. Credit Rachel Weisz, the Oscar-winner whose commitment to writer-director Alejandro Amenabar has resulted in one of 2010's unlikeliest biopics.
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Here at Movieline, we try to be cool and impartial, but when it comes to Ari Graynor, I'm just a full-blown advocate. Give this woman more roles! She can do scene-stealing supporting turns (like her perpetually wasted Caroline in Peter Sollett's Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist), tempting sexpots (Whip It, Youth in Revolt), and network TV arcs (Fringe) in equal measure, and she adds her own unique spin to the noir moll in Kevin Asch's Holy Rollers, where she plays Rachel, a drug dealer's girlfriend who entices Hasidic Sam (Jesse Eisenberg) further into a life of crime.
Graynor called up Movieline last week to discuss what made the part an unlikely fit for her, what she was supposed to be doing in one recent Fringe appearance, and the comic book role she's begging to play.
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Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis has tackled a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn't, and what went on behind the scenes.
So far this week, Movieline's talked to Bret Easton Ellis about movies made from his own books -- movies he often didn't script himself. His upcoming screenplay, The Golden Suicides, is for a very different film entirely. Adapted by Ellis from a Nancy Jo Sales article for Vanity Fair and written for producer Gus Van Sant, it's based on the true story of artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan (pictured above), a glamorous couple who eventually secluded themselves in a cocoon of paranoia when they believed that government organizations and Scientologists were out to get them. Duncan killed herself in July 2007, and a week later, the despondent Blake walked into the Atlantic and drowned.
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