English Entertainment
Directors Guild of America announces TV movie award nominees
MUMBAI: Directors Guild of America has announced the DGA’s nominees for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for Television for the year 2004.
The Superman movie star Christopher Reeve who died last October at age 52, nine years after he was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident, is among the five nominees. Reeve was nominated for the first time for the movie The Brooke Ellison Story.
Other nominees include Robert Altman for Tanner on Tanner – Parts 1-4, Sundance Channel; Joe Sargent for Something the Lord Made, HBO; Stephen Hopkins The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, HBO and Lloyd Kramer, Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven , ABC.
“This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first movie created exclusively for television. The works of the five nominated directors exemplifies the power and strength of the art form for the past forty years — where controversial social issues and compelling personal stories are writ large for the small screen,” says DGA President Michael Apted.
The winners will be announced at the 57th Annual DGA Awards Dinner on Saturday, 29 January at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
English Entertainment
Ellison takes his Paramount-Warner Bros case straight to theater owners
The Skydance chief goes to CinemaCon with promises and a skeptical crowd waiting
CALIFORNIA: David Ellison strode into a room packed with thousands of cinema owners and executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday and did something rather bold: he looked them in the eye and asked them to trust him.
The chief executive of Paramount Skydance vowed that his company would release a minimum of 30 films a year if regulators greenlight its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that has made theater owners deeply, and loudly, nervous.
“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” Ellison told the crowd. “Once we combine with Warner Bros, we are going to make a minimum of 30 films annually across both studios.”
It was a confident pitch. Whether it landed is another matter. Cinema operators have already called on regulators to block the deal, and scepticism in the room was hardly concealed.
Ellison pushed back by pointing to recent form. Paramount, born from the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last August, plans to release 15 films this year, nearly double the eight it put out in 2025. Progress, he argued, was already underway.
He also threw theater owners a bone they have long been chasing: all films, he pledged, would run exclusively in cinemas for a minimum of 45 days, drawing applause from a crowd that has spent years fighting for exactly that commitment across the industry.
“People can speculate all they want,” Ellison said, “but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment. And we’ll show you we mean it.”
Fine words. The regulators, however, will have the last one.
