Category: News

It has, somehow, been 30 years since the release of Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family. What became a massive hit seemed anything but during the production. What started out at Orion was sold to Paramount before filming had even completed, then, according to Sonnenfeld, the person at Paramount who bought the movie was fired later that same day. So here’s this weird movie, based on a quirky television show from 25 years before, that the studio that owned it didn’t even really want, being directed by a guy who had never directed a movie before. The Addams Family would go on to gross just under $200 million worldwide and became one of the highest grossing movies of 1991.

Before The Addams Family, Sonnenfeld had been the cinematographer on some huge films – Big, Misery, When Harry Met Sally – but it’s still a little bit shocking that The Addams Family was his first time as director, and only a few years away from the even more massive success he’d achieve with his Men in Black movies. Ahead (with the release of a new 4K print, which includes an extended cut of the film), Sonnenfeld looks back on his directorial debut, which sounds like a fraught experience. Sonnenfeld also discusses his ill-fated pilot for what supposed to be a Beverly Hills Cop television series. Sonnenfeld says what they shot was good (it’s still never been released), but why did it never make it to air? His best guess sounds like it basically comes down to “spite.”

There are a lot more characters listening to MC Hammer in this movie than I remember…

MC Hammer wrote a great song for us, actually! I really liked it.

“Addams Groove.” That was a big hit.

Yeah!

The other part I forgot about was when Gomez is playing with his toy train, there’s a passenger on the train and I looked it up and that’s you.

I wanted to find places where I could do a filmic version of some of Charles Addams famous cartoons. And one of his cartoons shows a person on a commuter train and he looks out the window and he sees some guy with a Lionel set. And I just love how Charles Addams always played with layers of information. And how surreal his stuff was. So, that was taken right out of a Charles Addams image.

The opening shot with the carolers and we boom up and we see the Addams family on the roof with a cauldron of boiling tar or oil or something? That was also a Charles Addams cartoon. There’s another moment where Fester is on the phone to his mother and Pugsley is in the background and Wednesday is tied to a chair and Pugsley brings Fester some poison to choose…

He chooses the arsenic, I believe.

That’s right! Arsenic. Well, they’re all based on Charles Addams drawings, so there’s that.

It’s surprising this is your directorial debut.

Because it feels like not a freshman director? Or why?

I get that you shot some of the most famous movies made – and Three O’Clock High, one of my favorites – but it’s this big movie with IP involved that made a lot of money.

You know, it’s funny. I was very happy being a cinematographer. As you stated, I shot the first three Coen Brothers movies, Three O’Clock High, Throw Mama From the Train, Big, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, so I was really happy being a cinematographer. I wasn’t looking to be a director. But Scott Rudin, who was a producer of the show, sent me the script. He tried to get Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton to direct Addams Family. And when both of those directors passed, he decided that he’d rather have a visual stylist because he felt The Addams Family, correctly, needed a certain visual style as opposed to just going to a comedy director. Because most comedies, for some reason, and I’m one of the exceptions, tend to have no visual style. They tend to be funny screenplays, but Addams Family really needed a very strong visual style. And that’s why I’m so glad we put all of “The Mamushka,” because it’s such a great song and dance number and Raul Julia is so good in it.

I want to talk about Raul Julia a little bit just because when I first saw this I wasn’t watching Kiss of the Spider Woman or The Morning After when was in 10th grade. Was he always the first choice? Because it seems like a brave choice to put someone who’s not known to maybe the target demographic as the main character?

We started at Orion Pictures and we were able to convince Orion early on because they really wanted Cher to be the female lead, to play Morticia.

That makes sense.

Yeah, you can see it. But in any case, we were able to convince Orion that we didn’t want movie stars. That the IP, the Charles Addams of it all, was the star. And that a real name, a big name, would just get in the way and would bring their own historical baggage with them. So, we really wanted non-stars. We were very quickly able to convince Orion to go with Raul and Angelica because they agreed that The Addams Family was going to be the star, the concept, and that we didn’t need stars or star salaries for that. What happened halfway through the movie, Orion was going bankrupt and we were the most saleable piece of IP they had. So, halfway through the movie we were sold to Paramount. And because Paramount bought something that was in progress, they had much less say. In fact, they bought it Friday morning and that afternoon the person who bought it got fired and the new person came in and hated our dailies.

What? Really?

Yeah.

Wait a second. So the person who bought The Addams Family got fired…

Not because of the movie…

But the same day?

The same day. Yeah. So now we’re at a studio that didn’t want us. So that was hard. That was very, very, very hard. But we got through it. And then after we finished, the marketing and distribution people loved the movie so much. They did a fantastic job. They were the ones that said, “We’ll give you more money if you can get MC Hammer to write that end credit song,’ because they really felt it was going to be value-added in marketing and distributing the song. So, they were great.

That song was everywhere.

No, he was great. A lovely guy. Lovely guy.

With all that going on, how’d you even keep morale up on set?

Well, I think we kept some of that secret from the actors. It’s funny. It started to get word-of-mouth before we came out and the industry had been going through a slump, which they do from time to time. But suddenly people were talking about The Addams Family and that it was going to be a hit. And they were predicting a $12 million opening weekend which, at the time, would have been a very big opening, 30 years ago. And our opening weekend was actually more than double that, so it was shocking how that happened. It was really amazing.

Was the ending a re-shoot? The whole movie Christopher Lloyd’s Fester is an imposter, but then in the last scene it’s explained it was actually Fester all along…

No, there was no re-shoot. Though the original ending had Fester still being an imposter. And Gomez saying, “You know what? You out-Festered Fester. And family is a state of mind and not biology. You’re the new Fester.” And at the table read, the cast rebelled. They hated that ending. And they went off into a corner and made Christina Ricci the spokesperson for them. She was probably nine at the time. And Christina came back and said to Paul Rudnick, the writer, and myself and the producer and said, ”This can’t work. The audience will be emotionally disappointed. They’ll wonder why Gomez worried about Fester for all these decades and then just doesn’t think about him anymore because he likes this guy. It’s an intellectual ending, not an emotional ending.” And she convinced us. We realized, “Oh, jeez. Maybe she’s right.” Paul Rudnick did a re-write. But that was not a re-shoot and when we first started to shoot, that was already in there. It might be slightly abrupt.

Maybe that’s the word I should have used, abrupt.

Right. That whole ending with hurricane Irene and Tully and Fester’s mother being thrown out the window? We were out of time, out of money, and Paramount was out of patience. And all that came together very quickly, so we didn’t have enough money or time to shoot that ending as properly as I would have liked to. So, that might be part of it, what you’re also experiencing.

You directed the pilot for the Beverly Hills Cop television series that wasn’t picked up. I’m curious if it would have had a better shot with the current streaming landscape.

Yes and no. The pilot was really good and I really enjoyed working with Eddie Murphy. There were two issues. The pilot wasn’t really about Eddie Murphy’s character, although he’s in it. And he’s really funny and really good. But it’s about Eddie Murphy’s son. But the other big issue, and I can’t say I know this for a fact, is the head of CBS was, oh, you know. What’s his name?

Les Moonves.

Les Moonves. And the head of Paramount, which was Tom Preston. But Les and Tom did not get along and Les, I think, wanted that job and Tom got it. Whatever. Somehow Les didn’t pick up that show in part because he didn’t want Tom to have that success. So there were internal politics involved. But the pilot was fantastic and I was really surprised that it didn’t get picked up.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

If there’s one defining feature to Donald Trump‘s presidency, it’s that he bounced every Friday afternoon to go golfing at his personal resort in Florida, essentially funneling taxpayer money into his own business. So it was especially rich when Eric Trump appeared on Fox News on Monday to criticize Joe Biden for not spending enough time at the White House.

“Afghanistan is falling,” the young Trump said. “Guess what, you have President Biden, who is in Delaware, not solving the problem.”

Again, Eric’s attack on Biden was particularly ironic given the elder Trump’s long-standing reputation for golfing every weekend and spending the majority of his time in the White House shouting at the TV and eating fast food. Once video of Eric’s specious attack on Biden hit social media, the reactions were quick and fierce (as Aaron Rupar put it, “Irony is deader than dead”):

Now, has President Biden spent personal time with family on the weekends? Yes, of course. But there’s naturally a vast difference between an occasional car ride from Washington D.C. to nearby Delaware, and Trump’s weekly flights to Florida. And when it comes to golf, well, the numbers speak for themselves.

According to Business Insider, President Biden only golfed once during his first 100 days in office, and he waited 87 days before hitting the green. By contrast, Trump had gone golfing 19 times during his first 100 days, and he currently holds the record of the most golf trips taken by a commander in chief. Unless Tiger Woods becomes president, Trump will probably be sitting on that record for a long time.

(Via Aaron Rupar on Twitter)

Dave Grohl recently released his memoir The Storyteller: Tales Of Life And Music, and it’s doing quite well. In fact, it made the Foo Fighters leader a best-selling author, as the memoir currently sits atop the New York Times‘ Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction best-seller list. Grohl guested on The Late Late Show yesterday and spoke about the book and how good it felt for him, a high school dropout, to show the book to his mother, who taught at the school that Grohl left.

James Corden asked Grohl who he was most excited to share the good news about his book with, and Grohl started by explaining the writing background of his family, saying, “Both of my parents were writers: My mother was a creative writing teacher, my father was a speechwriter and journalist in Washington, DC. So the written and spoken word was appreciated in our family.”

Grohl continued, “When I got my first copy of the book, I just kind of went to my mom’s house and dropped it in her lap and was just like, ‘Bam! Book drop!’ I mean, I dropped out of the high school she was a teacher at, so for me to be like, ‘What’s up, Mom? I got a book,’ it felt pretty good.”

Grohl dropped out of high school when he was 17 years old, making the choice because he had a major opportunity in front of him: to be the drummer of Washington DC punk group Scream. He was with the group for a few years before it disbanded, which led to him joining Nirvana.

Watch Grohl’s Late Late Show interview above.

When the Minnesota Timberwolves acquired D’Angelo Russell in February 2020, they did so under the belief he could be the perimeter complement to franchise cornerstone Karl-Anthony Towns. Russell is a good shooter and passer, and rostering someone who could conceivably ease the creation load for Towns made sense. Russell may not have been the most shrewd bet to fill that archetype, but it’s the direction Minnesota chose.

Since that trade, the Timberwolves have played 86 games. Towns and Russell have only suited up together for 25 of those contests. Further complicating matters is the selection of talented No. 1 pick Anthony Edwards, who, while years away from his prime, might actually project as the perimeter complement Minnesota idealized in Russell. Those three have only played 327 minutes together. Narrow the parameters down to minutes under head coach Chris Finch and that gets trimmed to 305.

Towns is a borderline superstar, one Minnesota should not and will not trade. Edwards enjoyed significant gains as his rookie season progressed and looks like he could be a devastating scorer relatively soon. He, too, is around for the long haul.

So, how does Russell slot in as the third member of this trio? Where does he discern his role after functioning as an on-ball creator for most of the last few years if the Timberwolves aim to continue refining Edwards’ handling chops? Edwards has reportedly appeared much improved defensively to open his sophomore year, but how tenable is a defense constructed around these three?

With improved health from Towns and Russell and another year of Edwards’ development, many of these variables can be addressed in 2021-22 — and the foundation was laid in some regards last season.

At least offensively, this group harmonizes pretty seamlessly. There were examples during the closing stretch of 2021 and in their 327 minutes together, Minnesota’s offensive rating was 120.9. The Russell-Towns pick-and-roll occupies defenses, while Edwards is an explosively canny cutter off the ball and budding spot-up threat. Yet there will also be times when Edwards commandeers possessions and slides Russell off the ball. Maintaining a quick trigger, zipping around off-ball screens and improving as an interior threat are the avenues to maximizing this role.

Both Edwards and Russell seemingly fit well alongside Towns. How those two pair together, though, is a bit murkier and probably forces Russell to make more concessions than Edwards. Whether it’s better applying his size at the point of attack to mitigate his lack of strength and lateral quickness or parlaying his playmaking intelligence into savvy off-ball reads, some sort of growth defensively feels imperative.

As they assimilate more on-court experience, the offense should progress. Edwards is a powerful slasher with a tenuous jumper. Russell is a versatile shooter and shaky driver. They can account for the other’s weaknesses offensively, while each fashions distinct, crafty two-man games with Towns.

Russell is important to this team’s success. How he stays healthy and navigates life around starkly different circumstances than the ones he first witnessed upon arrival in Minnesota will help determine what the interim and future shape up as for this franchise.

They say the best revenge is living well. And if that’s not possible, maybe it’s to sell off every personal memento you own from the person who wronged you in the first place. Now, we’re not saying that’s at all what Rudy Giuliani is doing, but if he were, it might be the smartest move he’s got. And that would explain how a very personal belonging of the embattled former New York City mayor ended up on the auction block. As People reports, a copy of Donald Trump’s 2000 book, The America We Deserve, autographed with a very personal message right around the time of the book’s release, would indicate that someone is looking to profit from these two dolts’ fractured relationship.

Last week, someone forked over a whopping $54,143 to purchase the keepsake, in which Donald wrote: “To Rudy — the best mayor N.Y.C. has ever had! I promise to never run against you.” At the time, Giuliani was indeed still New York City’s mayor. Whoever sold the book chose to do so anonymously.

It’s too bad that Trump didn’t add something like, “And I promise to never stiff you out of any legal bills,” as that might be something that could actually hold up in court and help Giuliani start to claw his way out of the financial mess he has found himself in as a result of pushing the “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was rigged at the behest of Trump, his former client. (Then again, it has been reported that a slightly blitzed Rudy told Trump to declare victory on Election Night to begin with.)

The Donald-Rudy bromance seemed to start falling apart back in January 2021, when Trump was said to have been personally offended by Giuliani’s request for $20,000 per day to serve as Trump’s round-the-clock lawyer. So he instructed his people not to pay Rudy at all.

Meanwhile, Rudy continued to suffer embarrassment upon embarrassment, both while attempting to defend the president—the world will never forget the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle, or the fart heard round the world that Rudy let squeak out during a public hearing with Michigan lawmakers—and all on his own (two words: Borat sequel). In January 2021, Giuliani was sued for $1.3 billion (with a B) by Dominion Voting Systems for pushing election fraud conspiracies; in April, his apartment was raided by the Feds; in June, the state of New York suspended his law license and Washington, D.C. followed suit in July.

Though the bulk of Rudy’s problems arose from being one of the few people to remain loyal to Trump and to continue pushing his election fraud lies with a straight face, Team Trump reportedly didn’t see any way to give Giuliani money that wouldn’t look bad for them—so they hung him out to dry.

All of which is to say that while there’s no real evidence that confirms that Giuliani was the seller of this assumedly brilliant tome, if it indeed was him, it might the first smart thing he’s done since getting involved with Trump.

(Via People)

Lucille Ball lived a one-of-a-kind life. I Love Lucy is one of the most adored and influential sitcoms of all-time (it holds up shockingly well 60 years later), and the first television series to show an interracial couple. She was the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio, Desilu Productions. And as Nicole Kidman-as-Lucy says in the teaser trailer for Being the Ricardos below, she was the “biggest asset in the portfolio” of both the Columbia Broadcasting System and Philip Morris Tobacco Westinghouse.

Being the Ricardos is written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, who was drawn to Lucy and husband Desi Arnaz’s life story because “the only thing better than a story people don’t know is a story that people think they know but they’re wrong,” he told EW. “There were plenty of points of friction, and that’s what I look for when I want to tell a story. I had this structural idea that appealed to me. I like claustrophobic spaces; I like claustrophobic segments of time. So I thought if I could tell the story during one production week of I Love Lucy — Monday table read through Friday audience taping — and tell it mostly on that soundstage, that there might be something good there. So I tried writing it.”

Being the Ricardos, which also stars Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz, J.K. Simmons as William Frawley, Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance, Tony Hale as Jess Oppenheimer, Alia Shawkat as Madelyn Pugh, hits Amazon Prime Video on December 21.

Move over, Tom Wambsgans. As Siobhan “Shiv” Roy—the only daughter of Logan Roy (Brian Cox), a Rupert Murdoch-meets-Donald Trump-type media mogul—Sarah Snook’s character on Succession is smart, honest, and determined, albeit often unconventional and full of surprises. And it turns out that Snook herself possesses a lot of these same traits (minus, of course, the cutthroat Shakespearean dramatics that come along with being a Roy, in which Shiv plays the role of Lady Macbeth). Snook recently revealed that she’s had a bit of a whirlwind year—not just because of the growing fandom surrounding the hit HBO show, which just saw record ratings for its season 3 premiere—but because she unexpectedly fell in love with one of her best friends, Australian actor and comedian Dave Lawson, and the couple quietly tied the knot back in February.

The Hollywood Reporter shared the story, which Snook revealed in a cover story for Vogue Australia (yes, despite the pitch-perfect American accent on Succession, the 33-year-old is Australian). “At the beginning of the pandemic last year, I got locked down in Melbourne with one of my best mates and we fell in love,” Snook explained of how the unexpected romance began. “We’ve been friends since 2014, lived together, travelled together, always excited to see each other, but totally platonic. We’ve just never been single at the same time. I proposed and we got married in February in my backyard.”

Yes, you read that correctly: It was Snook who proposed. So Shiv.

The wedding, which took place in Brooklyn, was a small and intimate affair, though another Succession star played an important role: Ashley Zukerman, who plays Shiv’s ex/former co-worker/sometime f*ck buddy Nate Sofrelli, served as the witness for the couple.

“It’s been a ride,” Snook said about the bittersweetness of the past year. “There’s so much heartache and sadness in the world, but on a micro personal level, I’ve been very fortunate… There’s a really lovely grace in that without the pandemic, we might not have ended up together so quickly.”

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

Meghan McCain said goodbye (and maybe a few NSFW words) to Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and the rest of her The View co-hosts in August after four years as the conservative voice on the talk show. “It’s been honestly the best of times and the worst of times in all ways, on and off this show,” she said in her final episode. “It’s been a really incredible, liberating experience and I will always cherish the time I spent with all of you.”

In her new memoir, Bad Republican, McCain finally explains why she decided to leave.

“For whatever reason, there’s a deep level of misogyny about the way The View is covered and written about in the media, where tabloids are always writing about the co-hosts hating each other backstage. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because the atmosphere of The View breeds drama: producers can’t control hosts, manage conflict or control leaking,” she wrote. McCain’s takeaway from her time on the show is that “working at The View brings out the worst in people. I believe that all the women and the staff are working under conditions where the culture is so f*cked up, it feels like quicksand.”

McCain also writes that after Donald Trump was elected president, “the treatment from Whoopi, Joy, and some of the staff grew meaner and less forgiving. It was as if I had become an avatar for everything they hated about the president. It felt like the co-hosts and staff only knew one Republican — me — and took out all their anger on me, even though I didn’t even vote for Trump.” Things took a turn for the worse after McCain returned from maternity leave. In a January 2021 episode, she joked, “You missed me so much, Joy. You missed me so much when I was on maternity leave. You missed fighting with me.” Behar’s harsh-but-fair response: “I did not. I did not miss you. Zero.”

Nothing anyone has ever said to me on camera since I have been giving interviews since I was 22 years old ever hit this hard. I felt like I’d been slapped. She yelled out at me sharp and intensely and I believed her. Now, I know I’m not always a perfect angel, but I would never speak to any woman that way who had just returned after giving birth. There are some things in life and some moments of time in life which are sacred. There are also times in life where you aren’t as strong as you usually are.

In discussing her decision to exit the “toxic work environment” during the pandemic, McCain wrote, “I felt like I was being disingenuous. I thought of the press I would have to do next season, the junkets. It’s all about women supporting women. I didn’t want to lie anymore. I couldn’t. I couldn’t put on the happy face after what I went through.”

You can read the rest of the Bad Republican excerpt on Variety.

(Via Variety)

If we learned anything from living through four years of Donald Trump in the White House, it’s that he views the world as a place where you’re either a winner or a loser—and that, despite his track record of being the latter, it’s still somehow an unfathomable concept to him. Which certainly explains why Trump has yet to concede the 2020 presidential election, nearly a year after it happened, and why the former president is all fired up over GOP senator Bill Cassidy basically calling him the L-word in a new interview with Axios.

As Rolling Stone notes, Cassidy didn’t hold back on his thoughts about Trump, including the unlikelihood that the former president could win the Republican nomination for president in 2024 if he chose to run again.

“President Trump is the first president, on the Republican side at least, to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in four years,” Cassidy told Axios. “Elections are about winning.” In addition to expressing doubts that Trump would have the support of the Republican party if he chose to run for president again in 2024, Cassidy also made it clear that he, personally, would not be in Trump’s corner.

Hearing this, of course, sent Trump into a bit of a tailspin. On Monday, The Hill reported that the former POTUS issued an official statement in which he introduced a juvenile new nickname: “Wacky Bill Cassidy.” In part, it read:

“Wacky Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana is a RINO Republican who begged for my endorsement in 2020 and used it all over the place to win re-election… then voted to impeach your favorite President.

I have done so much for the State of Louisiana, including making it possible to build major energy facilities that would never have happened without me filling up the strategic petroleum reserve at record low prices, and making sure they received huge amounts of hospital supplies and ventilators to aid the people of Louisiana in fighting the China Virus. Even the Democrat governor thanked me for all I did. Now, Wacky Bill Cassidy can’t walk down the street in Louisiana, a State I won by almost 20 points. He could not even be elected dog catcher. Wacky Bill is a totally ineffective Senator, but Louisiana does have a great Senator in John Kennedy.”

It’s not the first time Cassidy has spoken out against Trump. Back in February, the senator—who won reelection in 2020—was censured by the Louisiana Republican party after he voted to impeach Trump during his second impeachment trial. Cassidy was one of just seven GOP senators to vote against the former president. When asked about his decision to vote for impeachment, and the subsequent censure, Cassidy told Axios: “I slept very well that night.”

Below, you can watch a clip from Axios’ interview with Cassidy, who we’ll venture is sleeping well tonight again.

(Via Rolling Stone)

Lil Nas X released his Jack Harlow-featuring single “Industry Baby” back in July 23, but it was held back from having a No. 1 debut on the Billboard Hot 100 chart: It made its first chart appearance at No. 2 on the August 7 tally, the same week that BTS’ “Butter” became the longest-running No. 1 song of the year. Now, well over a month after its chart debut, “Industry Baby” is finally on top, as it’s No. 1 on the new Hot 100 dated October 23.

The song is Nas’ third chart-topper, after “Old Town Road” and “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” Meanwhile, it’s Harlow’s first No. 1, as his previous peak was at No. 2 with “Whats Poppin” and pre-No. 1 “Industry Baby.”

Both rappers were over the moon about the achievement. Nas wrote on Twitter, “IT TOOK A FEW MONTHS BUT WE HERE! THANK U EVERYBODY! INDUSTRY BABY IS THE NUMBER 1 SONG IN THE WORLD! LESSSSSGOOOOOO!” Harlow also wrote, “My first number one… I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see this coming while I was writing my verse. This song is something I’m gonna be proud to be a part of for the rest of my life. Thank you for having me @LilNasX.”

This song is also a big one for Ye (the artist known until recently as Kanye West), as it’s his fifth No. 1 song as a producer. It was a good week for Ed Sheeran, too, as “Bad Habits” (No. 4) and “Shivers” (No. 10) are both in the top 10. This is the second time he has had two tracks simultaneously in the top 10, the previous time coming in January 2017 when “Shape Of You” and “Castle On The Hill” charted at Nos. 1 and 6, respectively.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.