How “Queer Eye” Casting Director Danielle Gervais Found the Perfect Team
Danielle Gervais had the daunting task of finding the new Fab Five when the iconic reality series Queer Eye was rebooted by Netflix for a new generation. The Emmy-winning casting director scoured America with her team to find Antoni Porowski (food and wine), Bobby Berk (interior design), Karamo Brown (culture), Jonathan Van Ness (grooming) and Tan France (fashion). Five seasons later, countless lives changed, and many tears shed in the process, Gervais reflects on how it all came together and why choosing a favorite ‘hero’ is like choosing a favorite child.
Dashaun Wesley Takes MC Duties to a New Level on HBO Max’s “Legendary”
It’s a party that’s been years in the making.
Legendary, the original HBO Max series that debuted on May 27, celebrates the “legendary” underground world of Voguing and Ball culture with a reality competition unlike any other on television. Eight houses (aka teams), mostly comprised of Black and Latino LGBTQ members, pour it all out and onto the stage in a series of challenges, showcasing everything from dancing and voguing to fashion and flair.
“Unsettled” Looks at LGBTQ Refugees Seeking a Home in America
June celebrations, even virtual ones in this pandemic year, commemorate the birth of the modern LGBTQ liberation movement and the progress made over five decades since Stonewall, from marriage equality to the recent Supreme Court ruling protecting LGBTQ rights in the workplace.
But in many countries outside the U.S., LGBTQ rights mean only the right to survive.
San Francisco-based filmmaker Tom Shepard, whose many credits include the award-winning Scout’s Honor (2001) about the struggle to overturn the anti-gay policies of the Boy Scouts of America,
How Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” Got Its Signature Look
Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, known for his work on films like Bohemian Rhapsody, Drive, Three Kings, numerous X-Men installments, notes that his first feature with director Spike Lee always “felt like a distant dream.”
Not because he hadn’t crossed Lee’s path before, since the two had collaborated on numerous commercials, and he mentions having “known Spike forever it seems—we both came up in New York at the same time.
David France on the Terror Facing the LGBTQ+ Community in Welcome to Chechnya
Oscar-nominated filmmaker and former investigative journalist David France has a new documentary, Welcome To Chechnya, debuting on HBO June 30th, which has already won multiple awards on the film festival circuit. His film reveals the ongoing danger to LGBTQ Chechens targeted for persecution and death in a campaign to ‘cleanse’ the republic. France follows the activities of heroic activists, and profiles the people they hope to rescue out of harm’s way,
Director Ivy Meeropol on Her Deeply Personal HBO Documentary About Roy Cohn
After Ivy Meeropol directed her powerful and deeply personal HBO documentary Heir to an Execution (2004) about her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed for alleged espionage in 1953 with prosecutor Roy Cohn leading the charge, she felt she’d finally put the subject behind her.
“I thought for years that a film about Roy Cohn was in order, that it should be done and I couldn’t believe no one had done it.
Sam Feder Takes a Revealing Look at Transgender Depiction in Hollywood in Disclosure
Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen offers an eye-opening look at the history of transgender depiction in two universal media: film and television. The story is told through the perspectives and memories of trans people in the entertainment industry — Laverne Cox (also an executive producer of Disclosure), Lilly Wachowski and Jen Richards among them — and features clips and images that shed light on how American culture has dehumanized and made assumptions about the transgender community.
Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel on Shooting Spike Lee’s Epic Da 5 Bloods
On its surface, Spike Lee’s latest joint, Da 5 Bloods, is about four Black Vietnam war veterans who return to the country decades later to bring home the remains of their leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), who was killed in action. Secondary to this mission, the remaining four of the five Bloods (played by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Norm Lewis) also plan to locate and dig up a chest of gold bars they’d buried in battle.
Composer Sherri Chung on Batwoman, Riverdale & More
Composer Sherri Chung faced the production freeze due to COVID-19 with equal parts equanimity and patience. Because her work is often done alone, the self-quarantine aspect of the pandemic hasn’t changed her process all that much. Chung has a studio where she has her own recording stage that can fit about 15 players, so that part of her process has been shuttered, but the fact that she was already on a natural hiatus, as she described it,
Training The Pups in Think Like A Dog
Gil Junger, writer/director of Think Like a Dog, gave animal trainer Sarah Clifford a tough assignment. First, she had to train the title character, a shaggy dog named Henry, to do a variety of stunts that would allow the viewer to suspend disbelief that this dog was communicating telepathically with a kid. Second, find a way to make the dog and said kid, played by Gabriel Bateman, comfortable enough that we would believe they had been together for years.
Writer/Director JD Chua & Producer Juan Foo on Singapore’s First Creature Feature Circle Line
JD Chua had the distinction of being director Michael Mann’s only intern when he was in Hollywood, the man who made, in a seven-year period, three of the best films of the 1990s—The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), and The Insider (1999). As a child, one of Chua’s favorite films was Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. “I remember immersing myself in the laserdisc,”
Think Like a Dog Writer/Director Gil Junger on his Family Friendly Canine Comedy
Think Like a Dog is a warm-hearted fantasy adventure about a boy who invents a contraption that enables him to read his dog’s mind. It is reminiscent of Disney live-action classics like The Absent-Minded Professor and The Shaggy Dog. In an interview, writer/director Gil Junger talked about the pleasures of ignoring the show business adage about never working with children or dogs and how the film is a love letter inspired by his own experience of re-connection to his family.
#blackAF Costume Designer Michelle Cole on Re-Teaming With Kenya Barris
The creator of the hugely successful sitcom Black-ish, and its spin-offs Grown-ish and Mixed-ish, chose to step in front of the camera for #blackAF. The mockumentary series is Kenya Barris’ first project for Netflix. Based on his own life, Barris plays himself, alongside Rashida Jones as his wife Joya, in the show, which is now streaming. He’s an extremely wealthy TV showrunner with six kids,
Oscar-Winning Writer Kevin Willmott on Re-Teaming With Spike Lee For Da 5 Bloods
What happens when four Black Vietnam vets re-unit in present-day Ho Chi Minh City to retrieve a CIA shipment of gold left behind in the jungle forty years earlier? As imagined by Spike Lee in his new Netflix film Da 5 Bloods, the old soldiers’ quest leads to carnage, flashbacks, greed, and nervous breakdowns. As with every Spike Lee film, Da 5 Bloods manages to be timely, too,
Composer Terence Blanchard on Scoring Spike Lee’s Must-See New Epic Da 5 Bloods
Spike Lee’s films’ timeliness speaks to his prescience, and to his fearless, decades-long willingness to examine the continued and persistent injustice experienced by Black Americans. His new film Da 5 Bloods lands in the midst of a pandemic disproportionately affecting Black, Hispanic, Latino and Indigenous communities, and a wave of demonstrations protesting police brutality and systemic racism against Black people by those who are sworn to protect all Americans following the murder of George Floyd.
Director Daniel Karslake on the Shifting Battle for LGBTQ Equality in For They Know Not What They Do
Documenting the contemporary gay and transgender experience of young Americans and their families through the lens of religion isn’t easy. First, there’s the matter of finding interview subjects. For the follow-up to his Oscar-shortlisted documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, which focused on the homophobia of the religious right, filmmaker Daniel Karslake met with about thirty different families before matching with the four subjects and their parents at the center of For They Know Not What They Do,
The Many Lives of Indonesian Director Kamila Andini
Talking with multi-award-winning Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini might lead one to believe that she either possesses the power of time travel or that she’s in some way leading parallel lives, such is her unbelievably heavy workload.
When Indonesia imposed stay at home restrictions, Andini had just arrived back from Melbourne, Australia, where she had staged a theatrical performance, rich in local Indonesian traditional dance, of her 2017 film The Seen and Unseen (Sekala Niskala).
How Makeup Artist Louise McCarthy Helped Tattoo The King of Staten Island
As the makeup department head for The King of Staten Island, Louise McCarthy faced a unique challenge that she had never encountered before — creating laughs with tattoos.
Directed by Judd Apatow, the film stars Saturday Night Live alum Pete Davidson as Scott Carlin, a twenty-something slacker who has been struggling emotionally with the death of his father — a firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty when Scott was a child.
Arielle Kilker On Assembling a Largely Female Crew to Create Her Netflix Series Cheer
Arielle Kilker brings pretty much everything she’s learned in her career to bear in her Netflix‘s Cheer, the series she co-created, co-directed, edited, and produced. That includes the Emmy-nominated work she put in as editor on Chef’s Table and a supervising editor on the Peabody nominated Last Chance U. She’s also edited and written crime docuseries on projects for MSNBC, A&E, and PBS. For Cheer,
Director Josephine Decker on Capturing American Gothic Writer Shirley Jackson’s Complex World
Layers of creative output communicate the enthrallingly choleric New England household and inner world belonging to mid-century American gothic and horror writer Shirley Jackson in Shirley, which screened at Sundance and the Berlinale prior to its streaming release on June 5. Working with Sarah Gubbins’ script based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel of the same name, the filmmaker Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) catapults her audience into the dark Vermont home shared by Shirley (Elisabeth Moss) and her philandering professor husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and two young lodgers,
