Paramount and Scott Rudin Team on Next Novel From ‘Annihilation’ Author

With the highly anticipated “Annihilation” set to bow next year, Paramount is looking to stay in the Jeff VanderMeer business, as the studio has acquired the rights to his next novel “Borne.”

Scott Rudin and Eli Bush, who are producing the big screen adaptation of VanderMeer’s “Annihilation” for Paramount, will produce the new film.

The story follows a young woman named Rachel, who survives as a scavenger in a ruined, dangerous city of the near future. The city is littered with discarded experiments from the Company — a bio-tech firm now seemingly derelict. From one of her scavenging missions, Rachel brings home Borne, who is little more than a green lump, but exudes a strange charisma. And yet, little as she understands what or who Borne may be, she cannot give him up, even as Borne begins to grow and change in unexpected ways.

The novel will be published next spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

VanderMeer’s “Annihilation” is one of the more highly anticipated pics of 2017, as it marks writer-director Alex Garland’s follow-up to his critical hit “Ex Machina.” “Annihilation” stars Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson, and Oscar Isaac.

VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and most recently authored the New York Times bestselling “Southern Reach” trilogy. Recently, he was named the 2016-17 Trias writer-in-residence for Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Sally Harding at the Cooke Agency represented VanderMeer on the book deal. Joseph Veltre at Gersh handled film rights. Sean McDonald acquired the book for FSG.

‘American Crime Story’ Renewed for Season 3

FX has renewed Ryan Murphy’s “American Crime Story” for a third season, Variety has confirmed. The new season will explore the 1997 murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace.

The renewal comes on the heels of a big haul for the first season of the anthology series at the Primetime Emmy Awards, where “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” racked up 10 wins. Season 2 of the series, which will focus on Hurricane Katrina, is set to premiere on FX in 2017.

Season three will be based on the book “Vulgar Favors” by Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth. Tom Rob Smith will write the first two episodes in the season as well as subsequent episodes. Produced by Fox 21, the season will be titled “Versace/Cunanan: American Crime Story.”

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Versace was killed on the steps of his home in Miami Beach by serial murderer Andrew Cunanan, who killed himself eight days later on a house boat. Versace was one of five people murdered by Cunanan over the course of a three-month period in 1997.

Murphy will executive produce “Versace/Cunanan” with Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Brad Falchuk and Smith. Murphy is expected to direct the first episode, as he did with “The People v. O.J. Simpson.”

Directors Guild of America Sets Negotiations With Producers

The Directors Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have set a tentative date to enter into contract negotiations in early December.

“The parties have agreed that they will continue discussions in the interim to further define the issues before determining whether this will be the official start date for negotiations for the 2017 Agreement,” the guild and the AMPTP said in a joint statement on Tuesday. “As is tradition, the DGA and the AMPTP have also agreed that neither organization will comment further to the press regarding negotiations until an announcement has been made.”

The DGA tapped secretary-treasurer Michael Apted and third VP Thomas Schlamme as co-chairs of its negotiating committee for the successor deal to its master contract. The guild’s current three-year deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expires on June 30, 2017. The DGA has over 16,000 members.

SAG-AFTRA’s current master contract with the AMPTP also expires on June 30, 2017, while the Writers Guild of America’s deal will expire on May 1, 2017. The WGA usually goes into negotiations after DGA and SAG-AFTRA have completed their deals.

The AMPTP serves as the negotiating arm for the major production companies. AMPTP President Carol Lombardini is the lead negotiator.

In the 2013-14 round of negotiations, the DGA announced it had ratified its deal in early January of 2014 — six months before the contract expired. That contract provided for wage increases of 2.5% the first year, and 3% for the second and third years; a 0.5% increase in the pension plan, with the DGA able to divert that increase to wages in the first year if it chose; residuals also increased 2.5% the first year, and went up 3% in the second and third years except for network primetime, which increased by 2% each year.

‘Candy Crush’ Game Show Lands Series Order at CBS

CBS has given a series order to a TV adaptation of the wildly popular mobile game “Candy Crush Saga” from Lionsgate TV.

The hourlong series will feature teams of two players competing against giant interactive game boards to defeat obstacles and move through various levels to be crowned “Candy Crush” champion. The show promises to offer a play-along option for viewers at home.

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Reality TV vet Matt Kunitz created the TV format and exec produces for Lionsgate, CBS Television Studios, Pulse Creative and “Candy Crush” distributor King. Peter Levin, Lionsgate’s head of interactive and games, Striker Entertainment’s Russell Binder, King’s Nicki Sheard and “Candy Crush Saga” creator Sebastian Knutsson are also exec producers.

As mobile games, “Candy Crush Saga” and its companion “Candy Crush Soda Saga,” generated an average of 18 billion game rounds in September, according to CBS.
“We are huge fans of ‘Candy Crush’ and, like so many others, we know the ‘rush’ of advancing to the next level of the game,” said CBS Entertainment president Glenn Geller. “We’re excited to work with Lionsgate and King to adapt one of the world’s most popular and entertaining game franchises for television and make it available to its massive, passionate fan base who can watch and play along at home.”

Lionsgate TV chief Kevin Beggs credited Levin with bringing the “Candy Crush” IP to the studio and recognizing its potential for TV.

“We instantly knew it would make an incredibly visual, physical and fun TV program,” said Beggs. “We’re very happy to have Matt shepherding the production as we partner with the team at King on this series with the tremendous second-screen potential.”

Review: ‘The Lost City of Z’

 

Kurtz, the fabled central figure in “Heart of Darkness,” entered a primitive jungle world and made himself over into its homicidal master. His colonial malevolence was echoed in two landmark films of the ’70s: “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” in which Klaus Kinski’s bug-eyed, raving conquistador led a jungle odyssey into madness, and “Apocalypse Now,” in which Martin Sheen’s burnt-out assassin discovered, in Marlon Brando, a different kind of Kurtz — a philosopher of war’s evil, a leader who had gone “insane” only because he was the only one who saw Vietnam with utter clarity. But in “The Lost City of Z,” set within the British Empire during the early decades of the 20th century, the English explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) spends years seeking out the natives of the Amazonian jungle — and the mystery behind them — with a sense of purpose that is never less than high and mighty, progressive and noble. He’s a stiff-upper-lip adventurer-saint, enlightened in his thinking, driven by a personal quest that’s really a desire to heighten the spirit of mankind.

The movie was written and directed by James Gray, adapting David Grann’s 2009 nonfiction account of Fawcett and his expeditions, and Gray doesn’t shape Fawcett’s life into an overly tidy narrative; he lets it wind and sprawl. Fawcett starts off getting an assignment from hell by the British Army: In 1906, he is ordered to set sail for the jungles of Bolivia, where he’s to map out the border between that country and Brazil, a murky divide that’s leading to war. The British are driven by one motive (they want to protect their investments in the region’s rubber plantations), and Fawcett, an ambitious young major who has never seen combat, has a selfish priority of his own: His father was a drunk and a gambler, and the disgrace of that legacy has barred his entrance to the upper echelons of British military society. He’s promised that if he takes this mapping assignment and succeeds, he’ll be rewarded with a new status.

It’s a dicey tradeoff. Traveling up the Amazon on a raft along with his aide-de-camp, Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson, amusingly unrecognizable in a beard and spectacles that make him look he’s getting ready to star in “The Georges Bizet Story”), and a motley crew of assistants, including one South American slave, Willis (the superb Johann Myers), they are drifters in a hostile land, ducking showers of tribal arrows, subjected to starvation and disease. For about 20 minutes, the movie suggests “Apocalypse Now” redone as a “Masterpiece Theatre” episode. But the slave tells Fawcett about an ancient city that no white man has ever seen, and during a hike through the jungle, when Fawcett finds faces carved into trees and sophisticated pieces of tribal pottery, he decides that the promise of that lost civilization is no Atlantis/El Dorado myth. It really existed (and maybe still does), and it haunts him. He names the city “Zed,” and from that moment he’s driven to find it. He returns to England a celebrated explorer hero (victim-of-class-snobbery problem solved), but he wants to go back, and does. And then he goes back again.

“The Lost City of Z” is the story of an obsession. Yet Fawcett, as played by Charlie Hunnam, the 36-year-old British star of “Sons of Anarchy,” is a character driven only by the high-minded rapture of his ideals. Hunnam, wearing a prominent mustache, may remind you here of a handful of other prominent thespians. At various points, he exudes the twinkly moral intelligence of Daniel Day-Lewis, the slightly sullen earnestness of Michael Fassbender, and the quizzical anonymity of Ben Foster. He’s an accomplished actor, but he never brings a whisper of a dark side to Fawcett’s crusade.

I raise the issue because “The Lost City of Z” is a finely crafted, elegantly shot, sharply sincere movie that is more absorbing than powerful. It makes no major dramatic missteps, yet it could have used an added dimension — something to make the two-hour-and-20-minute running time feel like a transformative journey rather than an epic anecdotal crusade. As a filmmaker, James Gray (“The Immigrant”) has become such a critical darling that there’s now almost a cult of support for his work, and “The Lost City of Z” is destined to be hailed as another prestige addition to the Gray canon. Yet its popularity with audiences may prove more limited. The film is infused with Gray’s meticulous gravity, yet it also has his recessiveness — that feeling he can give you that you’re watching the action under glass.

Gray, as always, works with an elegantly muted visual palette (his favorite color: brown), and one can appreciate that his rhythm and style are a throwback to something you might call analog, or ’70s, or maybe just slow and deliberate. At moments, I’ve been a Gray fan (especially of “Two Lovers”), but it’s worth noting that the movies his style has at times recalled — the ambitious underworld films of the New Hollywood, say — were a lot more exciting, in their day, than the movies he makes. They never gave you the feeling that their directors were curating something.

“The Lost City of Z,” more than most of Gray’s films, is its own organic creation, and Gray catches the audience up in the fervor of Fawcett’s desire to locate that city and connect with the epiphany he’s seeking. After the first voyage, there’s an exciting scene where, aglow with his new mission, he gives a speech to the members of the Royal Geographical Society, of which he is now a member. He talks with religious exuberance about the artifacts he found and what they portend, as the white-haired fuddy-duddies in the audience jeer and mock him. What Fawcett is suggesting — that a “primitive” Amazon tribe might have had an advanced society that predated Europe — is nearly as radical as the theory of evolution. It undercuts the very premise of what it is to be an Englishman: the notion that they exist on a higher plane than “savages.” Fawcett realizes that he’s not just searching for the lost city of Zed, he’s — potentially — upending the meaning of Western Civilization. But at least one of the Society’s members wants to join him: a burly upstart named James Murray (Angus Macfadyen), whose bluster will soon come back to haunt him.The jungle scenes are full of threat — tribes with their whizzing and slashing weapons, wild beasts, the muddy isolation of it all. But that’s balanced out by the cozy utopia of Fawcett’s home life. His wife, Nina, is played by Sienna Miller in one of the most warmly expressive performances of her career; she makes the character a vibrant feminist on the cutting edge of her time. Yet she’s also as relentlessly supportive of Percy as he is of his own mission. (Their only tiff is about whether she can come along with him on his second voyage; he wastes no time mansplaining why she can’t.) As the years go on, they have three children, and Percy is absent for much of their upbringing, but the film treats this as a humane sacrifice. The animating spirit of Hunnam’s performance is one of such benevolence that he might be playing a tender-souled gentleman out of Dickens.

At one point, Fawcett’s eldest son, Jack (Tom Holland), chastises him for his absences, but the two bury the hatchet and wind up going on a trek into the jungle together. The most haunting aspect of Percy Fawcett’s story is that he disappeared in the Amazon in 1925 and was never found. What happened? Gray is forced to imagine what happened, and this produces his strongest filmmaking. The movie culminates on a note of poetic doom that is strangely uplifting. Yet even this doesn’t change what we think about Fawcett. He is, to the end, pristine in his obsession, and that makes him a character it’s easier to revere than to love.

Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Certain Women’ at London Film Festival

Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” a study of the lives of three very different women in Montana, won best film at the 60th BFI London Film Festival Saturday.

“In a vibrant year for cinema it was the masterful mise en scène and quiet modesty of this film that determined our choice for best film,” the jury said. “A humane and poignant story that calibrates with startling vulnerability and delicate understatement the isolation, frustrations and loneliness of lives unlived in a quiet corner of rural America.”

The jury president was Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose film “Chevalier” won the LFF best film prize in 2015. The other jurors were British screenwriter Abi Morgan; Anthony Chen, the Singaporean writer, director, producer; British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw; and Romanian director and screenwriter Radu Jude.

The Sutherland Award for the best first feature went to Julia Ducournau for “Raw,” about a young woman’s insatiable appetite for flesh in a playful coming-of-age horror tale. The winner was announced by the jury president Sarah Gavron, director of “Suffragette.”

Gavron said: “It is a film that shocked and surprised us in equal measure. We admired the way the director did something completely unexpected with the genre. We enjoyed the outrageousness of the storytelling, and the glee with which events unfolded. We loved the eerie originality of the setting, the dark, dark humor, the great score and the truly distinctive visual language. And the bold charismatic acting of the women at the center of a film that is both unique and unsettling, and will quite literally make some swoon.”

The jury also gave a special commendation to Uda Benyamina’s “Divines” for its standout female performance from Oulaya Amamra and for its great energy and veracity.

Gavron’s fellow jurors were novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls; director and producer George Amponsah; chief U.K. film critic for Variety Guy Lodge; British actor Matthew Macfadyen; and Nira Park, the BAFTA-nominated British producer of “Spaced.”

The Grierson Award for the best documentary went to “Starless Dreams,” a portrait of juvenile delinquent women at the extreme margins of Iranian society, by veteran documentarian Mehrdad Oskouei.

Jury president Louise Osmond commented: “’Starless Dreams’ is the story of young women in a juvenile detention center in Iran. By that description you’d imagine a dark film exploring a bleak world of broken young lives. This film was the very opposite of that. It took us into a world none of us knew anything about — the street kids, thieves and children of crack addicts of Iran — and showed us a place full of humor, life and spirit.

“Beautifully paced with great characterization and a very strong sense of place, director Mehrdad Oskouei captured the fears and friendships of these teenagers with such humanity. The profoundly moving irony of the film is that it was in this detention center, with others like them, that these girls finally found a sense of family and home; you feared for them most the day they were released back into their family’s care. It’s a film that stays with you for a very long time.”

The awards ceremony was hosted by Michael Sheen; guests included Alicia Vikander, Amma Asante, Anna Friel, David Tennant, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Kerry Fox, Lily James, Matthew Macfadyen and Michael Fassbender, who presented the BFI Fellowship to this year’s recipient Steve McQueen.

Power Restored to CBS’ New York Headquarters

CBS’ famed Black Rock headquarters has been closed since Thursday because of a power outage sparked by fire in an  underground Con Edison facility that serves the building.

Hundreds of CBS employees who work at 51 West 52nd Street in Manhattan have scattered to other CBS locations in the city for the past few days. The power outage has also affected tenants in the CBS-owned building such as Charles Schwab Corp., Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and other legal and financial firms that call Black Rock home.

Con Edison spokeswoman Joy Faber said the culprit was a fire in a nearby underground transformer vault. Black Rock is the only building in the area that is without power.

“The crews will be there all weekend working on repairs from the initial incident,” Faber said, but she could not offer a timetable for full power being restored to the building.

Black Rock is an iconic Midtown landmark designed for CBS by architect Eero Saarinen. The 38-story building is a concrete tower covered in dark granite and glass, with a sunken plaza also paved in dark granite. It has been designated an official New York City Landmark.

CBS declined to comment.

CBS’ corporate offices are based in Black Rock, as are CBS’ sales operations and CBS Sports. The outage has had no impact on CBS’ New York broadcast operations, which are housed at the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street.

Ben Affleck’s ‘Accountant’ Box Office With $25 Million Opening

Ben Affleck’s opening of action-thriller “The Accountant” is dominating moviegoing with a solid $25 million at 3,222 North American locations.

That’s about double the launch of comedy concert movie “Kevin Hart: What Now?,” which is performing respectably with about $12.4 million at 2,568 sites. But the debut of sci-fi adventure “Max Steel” is being shunned by moviegoers with less than $2 million at 2,034 screens.

Warner Bros.’ “The Accountant” looks likely to finish the frame in the same vicinity as last weekend’s winner, “The Girl on the Train,” which opened with $24.5 million. Moviegoers gave it an A CinemaScore with males comprising 58% of the audience, which was 86% over 25.

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Friday results gave “The Accountant” $9.1 million while Universal’s “Kevin Hart: What Now?” took in $4.8 million and “Max Steel” was nearly invisible with less than $600,000 for Open Road. DreamWorks’ “The Girl on the Train,” distributed by Universal, took in around $3.9 million on Friday and should edge “Kevin Hart” with about $12.5 million.

“The Accountant” is over-performing recent forecasts, which placed it in the $18 million to $20 million range. The movie carries a moderate $40 million price tag and follows a small town certified public accountant who makes his living cooking the books for criminal organizations.

Gavin O’Connor directs from a script by Bill Dubuque. Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Tambor and John Lithgow also star.

“Kevin Hart: What Now?” is a look at the final performance of his most recent comedy tour, filmed in August, 2015, at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field. Leslie Small and Tim Story directed.

The concert film is performing at the higher end of expectations, which ranged between $10 million and $13 million — which should make “What Now?” a profitable venture for the studio, given its production cost of under $10 million. Hart’s a proven performer in this genre with 2013’s “Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain” having grossed $32 million domestically.

Open Road is handling “Max Steel,” based on Mattel’s line of action figures and starring Ben Winchell of MTV’s “Finding Carter.” The film, produced  focuses on the teenage Max McGrath and alien companion Steel, who evolve into the superhero Max Steel.

Fox’s third frame of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” should finish fourth at around $8.5 million, giving the Tim Burton fantasy around $65 million for its first 17 days.

NBC Greenlights Reality Singing Competition Show With Modern Twist

The network has greenlit “The Stream,” a reality singing competition series that focuses on digital, streaming musicians, Variety has learned.

“The Stream” gives aspiring musicians the chance to be discovered through the internet and social media, like many of today’s stars such as Justin Bieber and Adele first found fame.

The talent show takes a twist on the tradition singing competition show, as contestants auditions will take place in the comfort of their own home — everyday people can upload their video to “The Stream” online platform where it will immediately become available to the public so that users can spread, share and stream all of their favorite acts and music. The 100 most-streamed musicians will then head to a showcase where they will perform in front of yet-to-be-announced industry titans who will then select 30 artists to work with for one week, and at the end of the week, each titan will sign their three favorite contestants. Those signed artists will complete in a weekly live show, which will be voted on by the audience via the number of streams for their music. The winner of “The Stream” will ultimately be the most-streamed artist.

Contestants can hail from all genres whether they are a solo singer, rap-duo or electronic group.

“‘The Stream’ brilliantly uses technology and social media to draw music lovers in and make them a part of the process. We’re excited to discover talent in this modern way and connect the best artists with the industry’s top starmakers,” said Paul Telegdy, president of alternative and reality group at NBC Entertainment.

“The Stream” is based on the Norwegian format. The series hails from Universal Television Alternative Studio, Monster, TV2, Nordic World and Little Hill. Steve Wohl at Paradigm packaged the deal.

For Universal Television Alternative Studio, “The Stream” marks the fourth recent series order for an unscripted show. Other upcoming projects are Jennifer Lopez’s “World of Dance,” entrepreneurial series “Funded” with Tyra Banks and “Common Sense,” which was announced earlier this week.

Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize

Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first American to win the top honor since Toni Morrison in 1993 and the first musician to be recognized.

The 75-year old singer-songwriter was honored for his intricate, evocative lyrics, and for his alternately political and phantasmagoric anthems such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Forever Young,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Rainy Day Women#12 & 35,” and  “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” He joins the ranks of William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Saul Bellow, William Butler Yeats, and Ernest Hemingway —  all previous laureates.

In selecting Dylan, the Nobel committee praised the singer and songwriter “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His prize comes with 8 million Swedish kronor, which roughly equals $900,000. He will be honored in Stockholm, Sweden, in December.

Dylan’s selection is a break with tradition. Although he has authored a book of poem, a collection of writings and drawings, and an acclaimed memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” the bulk of his writing has been the songs he popularized. Typically, the Nobel is awarded to poets or authors of short stories and novels.

Dylan’s victory also comes at the expense of Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo, all of whom are frequently mentioned among the top contenders for the literary prize.

Dylan’s work draws on myriad influences. He first came to prominence as a folk singer, building on the tradition of Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie. As his career continued, he has worked in many genres, from gospel to country to rock and roll, even releasing an album of Christmas songs.

“Whatever you do. You ought to be the best at it – highly skilled,” Dylan said in a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone. “It’s about confidence, not arrogance. You have to know that you’re the best whether anybody else tells you that or not. And that you’ll be around, in one way or another, longer than anybody else.”