From “Pachinko” to “Severance,” Costume Designers Discuss Their Apple TV Series
Last Year, Apple TV+ won seven Creative Arts Emmys and landed four Primetime Emmy Awards. They have kicked off this year’s Emmy FYC season with a number of events that will take place at The Grove in Los Angeles.
Last Thursday evening (5/19) a panel of costume designers took the stage to pull back the creative curtain of their series. The artisans making the journey were Jane Petrie from The Essex Serpent,
“Russian Doll” Costume Designer Jennifer Rogien Travels Through Time in Style in Season 2
During Russian Doll’s first season, hapless downtown New Yorker Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) can’t escape her own birthday party. In Season 2, she finds herself trapped by missing laws of space and time yet again, except now she’s a full-on time traveler. Stepping onto the 6 train, she gets off in her own neighborhood in 1982, where, she is understandably disconcerted to learn that she is her mother, Nora (Chloe Sevigny). Just as she gets used to firsthand insight into Nora’s crappy relationships and pregnancy with her own self,
Composer René G. Boscio on Scoring Teenage Turmoil in “Emergency”
Carey Williams’s new film Emergency (premiering in theaters on May 20 and Amazon Prime Video on May 27) is billed as a comedy-thriller. But when college students Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler), who are Black, and their buddy Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), who is Latino, find a drunk white girl they’ve never seen before passed out on the floor of their campus housing, it feels like Emergency is about to transform into straight horror.
“Moon Knight” Composer Hesham Nazih on Capturing the Sounds of Ancient Egypt, Modern Cairo, & Marvel Magic
Marvel’s Moon Knight recently concluded its first six-episode run (a second season is possible). Marvel’s latest Disney+ series centers on a mild-mannered British gift shop employee named Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac). Steven learns in the very first episode that he shares a body with an American mercenary named Marc Spector, who works as the human avatar for the ancient Egyptian god Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham). With the help of Steven and Marc’s mutual love interest Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy),
“Moon Knight” Costume Designer Meghan Kasperlik on Minting a New Marvel Superhero
Moon Knight was a particularly intriguing challenge for costume designer Meghan Kasperlik. Coming off an incredible piece of work with her designs for the gritty crime series Mare of Easttown on HBO, where Kasperlik was key to helping Kate Winslet fully embody a detective in Delaware County, Pennsylvania (as a DelCo native, I remain amazed by this series on every level), Kasperlik plunged into the realm of superheroes,
“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” Costume Designer Graham Churchyard Makes Marvel Magic
Directed by Sam Raimi, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is back in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and he and Supreme Sorcerer Wong (Benedict Wong) speedily land an unexpected assignment — protect America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teenage multiverse-traveler who can’t control her world-hopping powers. To keep his charge safe, Stephen turns to Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), who turns out to be living not in an apple orchard, busily mothering her twin boys,
“Operation Mincemeat” Director John Madden Slices Up A Delicious Spy Thriller
Writer Ben Macintyre’s book “Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory” lives up to its subtitle. The bizarre plan in question would barely be credible as the plot of a movie, let alone an actual piece of espionage history that really and truly did fool the Nazis and make an Allied victory possible. A sketch of that plan—doctor up a corpse to make it look like a high ranking British officer,
“Ozark” Editor Cindy Mollo on Cutting That Shocking Season Finale
*Spoilers for the final season of Ozark abound.
Cindy Mollo‘s big break came following a move to New York where she landed on the NBC show Homicide: Life on the Street editing a number of episodes throughout the ‘90s. “I’ve always worked with great writers,” Mollo says. “With Homicide, I learned from one of the best in the business, Tom Fontana, about how to put a story together,
“Winning Time” Showrunner Max Borenstein on Crafting an American Epic
Before Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty showrunner Max Borenstein sat down to write the show’s pilot episode, executive producer Adam McKay gave him one simple note: “Have fun with it.” Crammed with boisterous performances, Winning Time (its season finale aired this past Sunday, May 8, and is now renewed by HBO for a second season) does offer fun to spare but the series also brims with drama as it chronicles the betrayals,
“The Offer” Makeup Department Head Katy Fray Couldn’t Refuse
The limited series The Offer, now streaming on Paramount+, tells the deliciously dramatic story of how one of the greatest films ever made, The Godfather, almost never came to the screen. It is based on the memories of the film’s Oscar-winning producer Al Ruddy, here played by Miles Teller, and spans from the release of Mario Puzo’s bestseller in 1969, through the film’s production to its release in 1972. What makes the show so compelling is the spot-on portrayal of real-life figures important to the creation of Francis Ford Coppola’s deathless film to life.
Producer Autumn Bailey-Ford on Making Movies & Shows She Loves in Georgia
Autumn Bailey-Ford has been an independent film and TV producer working out of Georgia for the past 13 years. Originally from York, Pennsylvania, Bailey-Ford has worked her way up from production assistant—that invaluable, multifaceted job that has been the starting point to many successful film careers—to running her own studio…and co-running a second.
“I love film and TV,” Bailey-Ford says, reflecting on a career that began with her daydreaming as a little girl watching Bob Hope and Bing Cosby movies on Turner Movie Classics.
“The Survivor” Director Barry Levinson on His Astonishing Gut-Punch of a Film
Barry Levinson’s The Survivor is the type of film you fear you won’t be watching as much as enduring, as it’s centered on an unflinchingly brutal true story of a Holocaust survivor. A riveting Ben Foster plays Harry Haft, a Polish Jew who gets sent to Auschwitz in 1943. This, of course, was a death sentence, yet Harry manages to survive by inadvertently presenting himself as an intriguing source of entertainment for a pseudo-intellectual Nazi guard.
“The Man Who Fell to Earth” Creator Jenny Lumet Turns an Iconic Alien Tale Into a Modern Epic
The new Showtime limited series The Man Who Fell to Earth is inspired by the 1963 novel and subsequent 1976 cult classic of the same name. Highly anticipated, it is created by award-winners Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman, of Star Trek Discovery and Strange New Worlds. In this story, Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as an alien called Faraday on an urgent mission to save his homeworld. He tracks down genius scientist Justin Falls (Naomie Harris) who somehow holds part of the secret to saving both his world and ours.
Nicole Kassell on Producing & Directing HBO’s Devilish New Comedy/Horror “The Baby”
Shooting a television series under any circumstance is arduous at best. But when your title character is too young to even walk, it certainly increases the degree of difficulty. Producer/director Nicole Kassell discovered this fact quickly on her latest project, The Baby, a sly horror/comedy created by Siân Robins-Grace and Lucy Gaymer.
“Even with everything I’ve already done before, I think this might have been the hardest shoot I’ve ever done,” says Kassell during a recent Zoom interview.
“Everything Everywhere All At Once” Actress Stephanie Hsu on Landing the Role of a Lifetime
It’s very difficult to describe Everything Everywhere All At Once, the new genre-busting indie from writer/directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels. It’s a multiverse sci-fi brain twister, an action movie with Hong Kong-style fighting, and a moving family drama about a mother and daughter. It’s about existential dread, love lost and found, and, of course, the importance of paying your taxes correctly and on time. Michelle Yeoh is at her career-best as matriarch Evelyn Wang,
“Morbius” Scoring Mixer Jason LaRocca on Sinking His Teeth Into Marvel’s Vampire Antihero
After suffering throughout his childhood from a rare blood disorder, Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) heads into the Costa Rican jungle and cuts his hand open, thereby trapping a swarm of vampire bats. The bats are the final key to the brilliant doctor’s cure, which, as we can guess by the fact that these particular bats are highly attracted to blood, means that anyone who takes said cure will themselves also come to be highly attracted to blood.
“The Dropout” Composer Anne Nikitin Takes a Synthetic Approach to Elizabeth Holmes’s Treachery
Hulu’s limited biographical series The Dropout, which stars Amanda Seyfried as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, has been getting rave reviews for both Seyfried’s performance and for its sharp take on the shocking real-life story of corporate and personal hubris. The show follows Holmes from her beginnings as an ambitious college student with Steve Jobs as her role model, through her attempts to develop healthcare technology, and then to her astonishingly fast rise to fame and fortune as CEO of a billion-dollar company.
“Winning Time” Co-Creator Jim Hecht on His Love Letter to the Lakers
Jim Hecht‘s road to co-creating Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers began in 2014. Hecht was, by his own admission, at a low point, and he was looking for a project that really spoke to him. During his daily meditation, which he admitted with the qualifier “this sounds very LA,” he had a thought: “You gotta stop writing sh*t that you think other people would want to see and start writing the show that you would want to watch.”
Behind-the-Scenes With Five Female Singaporean Creators
“The last three years were an eye-opener because of the pandemic,” said Michelle Chang, managing partner at Singapore-based Mochai Chai Laboratories. “We are the post-production house at the tail end. If the producers stop producing, we are dead. The good thing was my business partner Chai Yee Wei has the foresight of not putting all our eggs in one basket. He has built a digital restoration lab. As luck would have it, a lot of distributors came to us because streaming platforms were buying catalog content and they need to up-convert into a compatible format for the streamers.
“The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey” DP Shawn Peters on Lensing Samuel L. Jackson’s Rare TV Performance
Based on Walter Mosley’s eponymous novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey portrays 91-year-old Ptolemy (Samuel L. Jackson), a lonely widower suffering from Alzheimer’s, as he undergoes a transformation thanks to Robyn (Dominique Fishback), the teenage daughter of a family member’s friend, and an experimental new drug, offered at a beyond questionable clinic.
Jackson, who rarely takes on television projects, is sublime as the limited series’ Papa Grey: by turns helpless,
