The TradeVine – Entertainment Trade Article Highlights – June 5th, 2020
Welcome to the TradeVine whose purpose is to encourage the entertainment industry to read their trades: Variety, Backstage, Hollywood Reporter, etc. Enjoy learning about your industry.
Each Friday, The TradeVine seeks out a few of the informative trade articles you may have missed. Please visit the trade, itself, for the entire article.
Backstage – How to Handle Failure + Rejection (And Come out Stronger), By Douglas Taurel
Being an actor, unfortunately, means that you will experience failure—likely more than once. I’ve experienced it, A-listers have experienced it, and if you haven’t already, you will. I’m not saying this to discourage you. On the contrary—“failure” is part of the game and if you’re not failing, you’re probably not trying. As you move along your journey as an artist, failure is a necessary part of the trip.
Because at the end of the day, it’s all about how you frame the experience. Instead of beating yourself up over a botched audition or forgotten lines, think of it instead as feedback. Yes, you’ll experience rejection and have tough moments where you feel like you royally messed up and there’s no possible way you can come back from whatever it is you deem a failure. But trust me when I say that it is never as bad as you think it is.
As artists, we focus so heavily on our failures, almost ignoring the positive aspects of our careers and performances. But our goal as performers should be to develop the ability to think extraordinarily, which in turn will help us frame those perceived “failures” in a more positive light. Thinking extraordinarily means having the ability to experience failure and have the discipline to ignore it, move on, and immediately focus on the next audition or performance. What separates those we admire in any field is their ability to learn from their failures, acknowledge, then ignore and move on. Read Entire Article Here
The Hollywood Reporter – ‘Hammer’: Film Review, By Frank Scheck
Will Patton plays a father desperately attempting to help his criminal son in Christian Sparkes’ thriller.
There’s nary a pop culture reference to be heard in Hammer, and that’s a good thing. Thankfully shorn of the stylistic affectations afflicting so many modern-day genre films, Christian Sparkes’ rural crime thriller is a throwback to the old-fashioned, lean and mean programmers that Hollywood used to pump out with regularity in the ’40s and ’50s. Delivering plenty of suspense in its taut 81 minutes, this is the sort of pretension-free film that in earlier days would have been directed by the likes of Edgar J. Ulmer or Joseph H. Lewis. Like those B-movies, Hammer lacks a big-name star. But it more than makes up for it by providing a rare leading-man opportunity for veteran character actor Will Patton, who delivers a superb, riveting turn.
Patton, whose recent credits include David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween reboot and a recurring role on the DC Universe series Swamp Thing, plays Stephen, the father of a young man who finds himself in mortal danger as a result of a drug deal gone wrong. Actually, not so much wrong as treacherous, given that Chris (Mark O’Brien, Ready or Not), Stephen’s estranged son, attempts to engineer a double-cross against his partner in crime, Adams (Ben Cotton). The ensuing violent encounter results in Chris’ accomplice Lori (Dayle McLeod) being left for dead, Chris fleeing the scene after ditching the money in a cornfield, and a seriously wounded Adams looking to exact revenge. Read Entire Article Here
Variety – Studios Debate When to Sell Movies to Streaming Services During Coronavirus, By Justin Kroll, Brent Lang
Sony had a decision to make.
Due to COVID-19, it was unclear when “Greyhound,” a World War II epic starring Tom Hanks, would ride into theaters. Widespread closures had upended the release schedule for films that were due to debut in cinemas for the next few months, and pushed “Greyhound” from its planned June 2020 date. The studio considered moving the film to 2021, expecting the pandemic to have dissipated by then, but it faced the prospect of competing with a glut of blockbusters that also had been pushed back. In response, Sony opted to solicit bids from streaming services, attracting multiple offers before selling the film to Apple.
The problem Sony faced isn’t unique. Studios are increasingly concerned about the logjam of films expected in 2021. All that competition will cut into potential profit margins, and it’s making it difficult to find attractive slots on the calendar to launch a film. “We are like those oil tankers off Long Beach with all this oil and nowhere to offload it,” says one top studio chief. Read Entire Article Here
Please send any questions or comments to Pepper@ActorsReporter.com
And, remember, you heard it through The TradeVine.
The TradeVine is a weekly article on Actors Reporter, a channel on the Actors Podcast Network, a Pepper Jay Production.