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Tag: Jay Kelly

  • Did Success Spoil Noah Baumbach?

    Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Focus Features, Netflix, Paramount, Samuel Goldwyn Films, Sony Pictures, Everett Collection

    In Noah Baumbach’s 2007 movie Margot at the Wedding, Jack Black’s character, a would-be painter, former musician, and general layabout named Malcolm, is accused by his fiancée of being competitive with everyone. “It doesn’t even matter if they do the same thing as you,” she says. “He’s competitive with Bono.” Malcolm concedes the point, explaining, “I don’t subscribe to the credo that there’s enough room for everyone to be successful. I think there are only a few spots available” — and people like Bono are taking them up. The implication is that, were it not for the tragic injustice of the limited-spots situation, Malcolm would be recognized for being as talented, if not more, than the lead singer of one of the biggest rock bands in the world.

    Malcolm is a typical Baumbach character: delusional and ludicrously self-important, yet not totally wrong either. (Who has not heard Bono speak and thought, Why him?) Others cut in the same mold include Walt Berkman (Jesse Eisenberg) from 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, a teenager who rationalizes his plagiarizing of a Pink Floyd song by saying, “I felt I could have written it”; Roger Greenberg (played by frequent Baumbach collaborator Ben Stiller) of 2010’s Greenberg, a middle-aged misanthrope living in the long aftermath of a ruinous decision in his youth to turn down a major record deal because it wasn’t good enough for him; Josh Srebnick (Stiller) of 2014’s While We’re Young, a struggling filmmaker who has toiled for years on a dull documentary about “how power works in America”; and Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman) of 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories, an elderly sculptor blaming his obscurity on the shallow philistinism of the art world: “I think I would have had greater success if I’d been more fashionable.”

    These are men at every stage of life who resent the world for not recognizing their genius. The older ones are haunted by forks in the road where the path not taken surely would have led to the success they both feel they deserve and desperately desire. Their narcissism is not tempered with a single drop of humility, but rather with oceans of self-loathing that are then channeled outward, in scalding torrents, at their friends and family. They construct elaborate justifications for their selfish and cruel behavior, while insisting that they themselves have been overlooked and misunderstood. They are in a permanent state of arrested development (“I haven’t had that thing yet where you realize you’re not the most important person in the world,” Malcolm says), their massive egotism undermined by deficiencies in the basic skills of living, like knowing how to cook or drive or swim.

    These men are also fathers and sons, the horrific dad being a mainstay of the Baumbach canon. The archetype is Jeff Daniels’s Bernard Berkman from The Squid and The Whale, a has-been writer who instills in Eisenberg’s Walt a monstrous sense of superiority through a million high-handed pronouncements and snap judgments: dismissing A Tale of Two Cities as “minor Dickens,” insinuating that Walt’s girlfriend isn’t hot enough for him. Bernard is reprised in Hoffman’s Harold Meyerowitz, who is aggressively uninterested in his children’s lives, their only purpose being to serve as minor satellites that reflect his glory back onto him. His son Matthew, also played by Stiller, makes a lot of money as a financial adviser, but unfortunately, the only sort of success that matters in Baumbach’s universe is artistic in nature. “I beat you! I beat you!” Matthew screams at his father in one scene as Harold drives away, obstinately deaf to his son’s claims, aloof to his very existence.

    I have made this taxonomy of the Baumbach male because the curious thing about his latest movie, Jay Kelly, is that this distinctive creature barely features in it. Jay Kelly is Baumbach’s most nakedly award-aspiring film to date, a starry tribute to the magic of the movies that seemed to be an Oscars contender before joining Wicked: For Good in the ignominious club of hopefuls that got zero nominations. There will be no gold statuettes to compensate for the fact that Jay Kelly is also one of Baumbach’s weakest offerings, verging on the maudlin and containing few of the ingredients that made his body of work so beloved by those who queasily saw something of themselves in his loathsome, exasperating men. The Baumbach male appears here as a mere echo, a figure of diminishing interest who serves to punctuate the director’s new concerns and obsession: becoming an artist who identifies more with the Bonos of the world than the Malcolms.

    If Baumbach, 56, is one of the preeminent chroniclers of white Generation X, from the 1980s adolescent experience of The Squid and the Whale to the midlife crises of While We’re Young and 2019’s Marriage Story, then Jay Kelly is his late-middle-age movie, preoccupied with the looming shadow of death. George Clooney plays the titular character, a Hollywood star in his 60s who, like Clooney himself, is heir to the classic leading men of old: Gene Kelly, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant. His sun-kissed existence is disturbed by a series of overlapping events: his youngest daughter, Daisy, flying the coop to college; the death of his mentor; and, most fatefully, a run-in with an old acting-school friend, Tim, who flamed out of the business long ago, while Jay’s career soared into the stratosphere.

    Jay is worried that the Jay onscreen is just a persona, a vaporous construct built from the projections of fame and the machinery of Hollywood, as thin as the sets where he spends much of his time. “Is there a person in there?” Tim asks him after they have one too many drinks at the bar. “Maybe you don’t actually exist.” Free from fame’s distorting prism, Tim definitely exists, in all his inconsequential glory, and is awfully bitter about it, especially since he holds Jay responsible for nabbing a role that would have sent him on his merry way to stardom. Tim, played with coiled resentment by Billy Crudup, is the closest thing the movie has to a quintessential Baumbachian frustrated artist, and at first, it seems like the movie is going to tantalizingly play as a duel between these opposing representatives of failure and success, the two poles of Baumbach’s world. When Jay muses about remembering the man he once was, Tim shoots back, “I don’t think you want to meet that guy again.” He holds in contempt the young Jay for stealing his shot at fame as well as the old Jay for looking back fondly at a time when he was a nobody — which, of course, is one of the privileges of being a somebody.

    This would seem to offer Baumbach fertile thematic ground, another of his forks in the road, the decisive moment that determines his characters’ future happiness and self-esteem — their entire identity, actually, according to their own pitiless scorecard for measuring a life’s worth. Instead, the confrontation with Tim sends Jay on a picturesque trip through France and Italy, chasing after some quality father-daughter time with Daisy. She and her friends are spending their last summer before college doing typical young people things — charging stuff to their parents’ credit cards, staying in cheap hostels, hooking up with European strangers — and naturally, she doesn’t want her father around. So Jay is left to hang with an entourage that includes his publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), and his manager, Ron (a criminally underutilized Adam Sandler), as Jay take selfies with starstruck travelers and makes his way to a film festival in Tuscany where he is to be presented with a tribute for his work. Along the way, he revisits scenes from his life.

    Not a lot happens on this journey. There is an aimless and ultimately aborted subplot about a past romance between Liz and Ron. Jay thwarts a robbery and reluctantly becomes a tabloid hero — more grist for the nagging feeling that his life isn’t real. He confronts his eldest daughter, Jessica, in flashback as she accuses him of choosing his career over their family. Jay’s ostentatious success confounds Baumbach’s usual parental dynamics, which revolve around megalomaniacal patriarchs unleashing their psychological traumas on their poor kids. Jay’s absence as a dad seems like a blessing compared to the ever-present shadow Baumbach’s other fathers cast on their children. (Take Bernard Berkman’s insistence on “my night” in his custody battles with his ex-wife, Joan, which are less expressions of filial affection than pathetic attempts to have people around he can easily dominate.) Jay’s time in Tuscany includes a detour in which he confronts his own neglectful father, but Kelly père exhibits little of the venom that characterizes Baumbach’s usual bad dads.

    In the end Jay is abandoned by everyone but Ron, his faithful Sancho Panza, and left to wonder whether his career and his life amount to anything at all. (Spoiler alert: He realizes that they do.) The film clearly takes inspiration from 8 ½, Federico Fellini’s masterpiece of self-reproach and self-doubt, but it perhaps more closely resembles the Love Actually plotline that sees Bill Nighy realize his dowdy manager is the love of his life. The only reason Jay Kelly is not a disaster is the presence of Clooney, who is about as interesting an icon of fame as you can get, giving it a modicum of pathos and a lot of allure. At 64, he is nearly as handsome as ever, making even Crudup seem a tad pedestrian in comparison. What Clooney can’t do, even if he had been asked to try, is convey what it is like to fail, to be stuck for your entire life with a version of yourself that is unnoticed and unadmired — what it is like, in other words, to be most people.

    Baumbach has argued that there is consistency across his films. “A lot of my movies are about people who self-identify as a failure because the lack of success, to them, has equaled failure, which is not the case,” he recently told the New York Times. “But defining yourself by your success does the same thing: It’s just another way to not look at yourself as who you might actually be. That’s definitely the case for Jay.”

    I’m not sure I buy that there’s such an equivalence. (For one, whatever illusions come with success are far less corrosive to the soul than those that accompany failure.) It’s also clear some deeper change has taken place in Baumbach’s movies, starting with Marriage Story. Baumbach’s previous avatars onscreen had been Eisenberg and Stiller, playing awkward, painfully insecure characters who seemed to be crawling out of their skin. Then he became Adam Driver: tall, handsome, exuding importance. Driver plays a theater director so acclaimed that he scores a MacArthur “genius” grant, the kind of award a classic Baumbach character would have deranged fantasies about winning. The movie opens with his soon-to-be-ex-wife enumerating, in a letter to their therapist, all the ways he’s a good father: “It’s almost annoying how much he likes it, but it’s mostly nice.” That was new.

    Although Baumbach’s movies are not strictly autobiographical, they are obviously informed by his life. The messy divorce of his parents is the inspiration for The Squid and the Whale, while his separation from Jennifer Jason Leigh forms the contextual background of Marriage Story. Baumbach’s own father, the writer Jonathan Baumbach, died in 2019, a couple of years after The Meyerowitz Stories, which showed that even adults still need their fathers — still crave their attention, approval, and respect — and still can be hurt by them. It is no great stretch of the imagination to surmise that he has more than a little in common with the disgruntled men who believe the world has unfairly passed them over; as he once told the Times, The Squid and the Whale, which followed an eight-year dry spell in his directorial career, “makes me very emotional, because it reminds me of the time I was writing it and feeling like it was my last chance after having struggled for a bit.” I’d further posit that bearing a grudge against the universe and believing you’re an unrecognized genius, the fundamental qualities of the Baumbach male, might be necessary for making valuable works of art. That a little delusion and rage are required to keep the demons of complacency away.

    Being a father himself (he has two young boys with his partner, Greta Gerwig, as well as an older child with Leigh) seems to have softened Baumbach. “I cry a lot now,” he recently told GQ. “I find a lot of life emotional in a good way.” His professional collaborations with Gerwig produced Frances Ha and Barbie, both of which are markedly more buoyant than Baumbach’s early work. Marriage Story was followed by White Noise, a $100 million adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel that lurched in a totally different direction, a bewildering misfire that suggested Baumbach wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself and was casting about for inspiration from literature. Jay Kelly feels like Baumbach stepping through the mirror, peering back at his world through the lens of age and enviable accomplishment.

    So what happens when your ego is satisfied, when your innermost vision of yourself is validated by the outer world? Marriage Story is not one of his best movies, but it shows that Baumbach can evolve and take risks that mostly pay off. I am thinking in particular of a scene toward the end in which Driver sings “Being Alive” at a bar in front of the members of his theater company. His character is a little drunk and feeling sentimental, a common scenario for singing along to Sondheim, and it has the potential to be deeply embarrassing. But the scene works, both weird enough to be interesting and a straightforward appeal, via Sondheim’s transportive wizardry, to the biggest emotions: love, regret, the terror of being alone. At that moment, Driver resembles Baumbach’s unlovable losers, whose grandiose conceits ultimately burn away in the harsh light of reality, forcing them to “embrace the life you never planned on,” as one character puts it in Greenberg, a life that you feel is beneath you. Here’s hoping Baumbach hasn’t forgotten that feeling.

    Ryu Spaeth

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  • Adam Sandler Promises to Make “50 More Movies Before I Am Dead — and at Least 25 of Them Will Be Good”

    Adam Sandler received the Career Achievement Award at AARP’s Movies for Grownups Awards on Saturday, where he got real about, well, getting old.

    “A lot of people said to me, ‘Sandman, getting an AARP award means that you’re old now.’ To what I say, it’s not because of this award. I’ve got 10 other reasons that you know I am fucking old,” Sandler joked after accepting the honor from friend Henry Winkler.

    He proceeded to have the crowd in stitches as he listed through those 10 reasons, which included, “The other day, I had to swallow a Viagra to take a piss. And I had to call my doctor because the piss lasted for more than four hours” and “the font on my phone is so big that my texts can be read by anyone with a window seat on a Delta flight.”

    There was also “At my high school reunion, I spent most of the night saying, ‘I’m so sorry to hear that;’” “None of my toenails are the same color anymore. If I take my socks off, it looks like a fucking pack of Crayola crayons” and “When I receive the Academy Awards screeners, even though I press play on 44 different movies, I can only stay awake for a combined total of eight minutes. For all of you who are getting all the accolades, I must say I love the first 30 seconds of all of your work.”

    He then thanked his wife Jackie for “staying with me even though no part of my body is where it used to be” and the star, who is in the midst of awards buzz for Jay Kelly, mused, “I don’t know how much time I have left — 60, 70 years. 80 tops, maybe 90 if I start working out and taking creatine.” Regardless, he said, “I promise to everyone here tonight, I will make at least 50 more movies before I am dead — and at least 25 of them will be good.”

    [ad_2] Kirsten Chuba
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  • George Clooney Says “When I Grow Up, I Want to Be Noah Wyle” as Two Stars Unite 30 Years After ‘ER’

    The Movies for Grownups Awards on Saturday night played host to an ER reunion, as George Clooney and Noah Wyle reunited (twice) on the awards stage and talked about their longtime friendship.

    Both men were winners at the AARP awards show — best actor for Clooney (Jay Kelly) and Wyle for best TV actor (The Pitt).

    In presenting to Wyle, Clooney joked that AARP should do a “Sexiest Man Still Alive” issue and declared, “I would nominate Noah Wyle as the first guy.”

    “I met Noah in 1993. He hadn’t worked a lot yet and we did this show called ER and it was this crazy hit. At one time we had 40 million people watching and I remember Noah going, ‘Is that good?’ I was like, ‘That’s good, that’ll never happen again.’ He was wise beyond his years from the very beginning, from the very start,” Clooney told the crowd at the Beverly Wilshire. “He was the kindest person I ever met. We became very dear friends very quickly, and remained that way.”

    He went on to compliment The Pitt star as a great father and husband as well as an actor, adding, “I’m very proud to call him a friend, I’m also proud to call him a colleague. When I grow up, I want to be Noah Wyle.”

    “You got me choked up there buddy,” Wyle said as he took the stage, before crediting much of what he does on the set of The Pitt as an actor, writer, executive producer and director to what he learned from Clooney on ER.

    “I remember vividly, the first week of ER, he called the entire cast into his trailer and said ‘OK everybody, this is how it’s gonna be. We’re going to be nice to everyone. There’s not going to be any divisions between the cast and crew or foreground and background, we’re going to learn our lines, we’re going to be on time,’” and take the work seriously themselves, Wyle recalled. He continued, “After that, that was the way it worked, and the first 15 years of my career, that is how it worked. And I spent the next 15 years trying to find that feeling — that sense of family, that sense of commitment. It was only with The Pitt that I found it again.”

    Wyle also gave the same treatment to Clooney for his award, presenting him with the best actor honor after praising his work in Jay Kelly.

    Clooney teased from the stage, “Thank you to the AARP. I have to say, Movies for Grownups just means old people — I realize now that the only way I was going to win anything was if Timothée Chalamet is too goddamn young” to be nominated.

    He went on to express his love for actors, noting, “I have a great affinity [for them] and I don’t enjoy watching people be cruel to actors. By the way, Paul Dano and Owen Wilson and Matthew Lillard, I would be honored to work with those actors,” referencing Quentin Tarantino’s recent comments criticizing those men.

    “We live in a time of cruelty, we don’t need to be adding to it,” Clooney said, before concluding, “Thank you for this. It’s going to be a long, tough couple of years but we’ll all get through it together.”

    [ad_2] Kirsten Chuba
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  • Adam Sandler Brings Down the House at Palm Springs Gala With Hilarious ‘What If’ He Hadn’t Made It Speech

    Adam Sandler delivered one of the most memorable moments of the Palm Springs International Film Awards gala, turning a heartfelt honor into a full-blown comedy set while accepting the Chairman’s Award.

    Presented by his “Jay Kelly” co-star Laura Dern, Sandler took the stage and quickly veered into a wildly funny alternate-history monologue, imagining what his life might have looked like had his acting career stalled after college.

    “When I graduated college, I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and my father told me he was very proud of me and I should try it out for one year,” Sandler recalled. “He said, ‘See if you get something going. If it doesn’t work out after one year, you’ll come work for me.’ My dad was an electrical contractor. I didn’t know very much about electricity or contracting.”

    From there, Sandler riffed on a fictional future spent wiring fuse boxes instead of movie sets, joking that he’d still be married to his wife, Jackie, but living in a much smaller house with “about 10 less bathrooms and a few less statues of me.”

    He added that he’d “probably know how to charge my own phone” and would still get stopped on the street. “Not because of the fame factor, but because they’ve never seen anybody with that much scoliosis.”

    The bit escalated as Sandler roped his longtime friend Rob Schneider into the fantasy, joking that Schneider would “work with me on every electrical contracting project I ever had to do.”

    Amid the laughs, Sandler repeatedly returned to gratitude, crediting the unlikely run that followed that pivotal first year out of college. “I’ve been acting a very long time,” he said. “I can’t thank you all enough for letting me have this career that I’ve been lucky enough to have.”

    He singled out “Jay Kelly” his recent creative high point, praising the cast and director Noah Baumbach for pushing him to do some of his best work.

    “I didn’t want to let him down. I didn’t want to let down any of my castmates. I didn’t want to let down my family. I didn’t want to let myself down,” Sandler said sincerely. “So I always try my best.”

    The speech closed on a characteristically sincere note, with Sandler thanking his wife — “my forever girl” — and promising the audience he’s not done yet.

    “Thank you guys for letting me make all these movies over the years. I’m going to try to make more.”

    The Palm Springs International Film Awards gala, held annually during the Palm Springs International Film Festival, has become a key stop on the awards-season circuit. Sandler is currently nominated for a Critics Choice and Golden Globe Award for his turn in Baumbach’s film.

    Clayton Davis

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  • Adam Sandler will receive AARP’s Movies for Grownups career achievement award, his second AARP prize

    LOS ANGELES (AP) — Adam Sandler will be the next recipient of AARP’s Movies for Grownups career achievement award, the group said Tuesday.

    And maybe this time, the actor will wait for his signal.

    When Sandler won the group’s best actor prize in 2020 for“Uncut Gems,” he rushed to the stage too fast — before host Conan O’Brien had time to sing his praises. O’Brien made comic hay of the moment, sending the sheepish actor back to his seat with instructions to await “a signal.”

    From his “Saturday Night Live” roots to beloved comedies like “Billy Madison” (1995) and the cult classic “Happy Gilmore” (1996) to dramas like “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002) and his high-energy turn in “Uncut Gems” (2019), Sandler, 59, has displayed an ever-growing range.

    This summer he reprised “Happy Gilmore” on Netflix and in November will appear alongside George Clooney in Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly.”

    Winner of the 2023 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Sandler “is one of Hollywood’s most enduring and ever-evolving stars, whose talents resonate across generations,” AARP said in a statement on Tuesday.

    Myechia Minter-Jordan, the group’s CEO, called the actor “a Hollywood legend whose remarkable career has set a new standard for comedic storytelling, captivating audiences across generations.

    “Adam’s enduring success, his ability to reinvent himself, inspire laughter, and move us through dramatic performances is a testament to the power of creativity at every age,” Minter-Jordan said.

    AARP launched the Movies for Grownups initiative in 2002 to advocate for audiences over 50, fight ageism in Hollywood and promote movies “for grownups, by grownups.”

    Actor Alan Cumming will host the ceremony in Beverly Hills on Jan. 10, to be broadcast by “Great Performances” on PBS in February.

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  • Adam Sandler will receive AARP’s Movies for Grownups career achievement award, his second AARP prize

    Adam Sandler will be the next recipient of AARP’s Movies for Grownups career achievement award, the group said Tuesday.And maybe this time, the actor will wait for his signal.When Sandler won the group’s best actor prize in 2020 for”Uncut Gems,” he rushed to the stage too fast — before host Conan O’Brien had time to sing his praises. O’Brien made comic hay of the moment, sending the sheepish actor back to his seat with instructions to await “a signal.”From his “Saturday Night Live” roots to beloved comedies like “Billy Madison” (1995) and the cult classic “Happy Gilmore” (1996) to dramas like “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002) and his high-energy turn in “Uncut Gems” (2019), Sandler, 59, has displayed an ever-growing range.This summer, he reprised “Happy Gilmore” on Netflix, and in November, he will appear alongside George Clooney in Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly.”Winner of the 2023 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Sandler “is one of Hollywood’s most enduring and ever-evolving stars, whose talents resonate across generations,” the AARP said in a statement on Tuesday.Myechia Minter-Jordan, the group’s CEO, called the actor “a Hollywood legend whose remarkable career has set a new standard for comedic storytelling, captivating audiences across generations.”Adam’s enduring success, his ability to reinvent himself, inspire laughter, and move us through dramatic performances is a testament to the power of creativity at every age,” Minter-Jordan said.AARP launched the Movies for Grownups initiative in 2002 to advocate for audiences over 50, fight ageism in Hollywood and promote movies “for grownups, by grownups.”Actor Alan Cumming will host the ceremony in Beverly Hills on Jan. 10, to be broadcast by “Great Performances” on PBS in February.

    Adam Sandler will be the next recipient of AARP’s Movies for Grownups career achievement award, the group said Tuesday.

    And maybe this time, the actor will wait for his signal.

    When Sandler won the group’s best actor prize in 2020 for”Uncut Gems,” he rushed to the stage too fast — before host Conan O’Brien had time to sing his praises. O’Brien made comic hay of the moment, sending the sheepish actor back to his seat with instructions to await “a signal.”

    From his “Saturday Night Live” roots to beloved comedies like “Billy Madison” (1995) and the cult classic “Happy Gilmore” (1996) to dramas like “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002) and his high-energy turn in “Uncut Gems” (2019), Sandler, 59, has displayed an ever-growing range.

    This summer, he reprised “Happy Gilmore” on Netflix, and in November, he will appear alongside George Clooney in Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly.”

    Winner of the 2023 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Sandler “is one of Hollywood’s most enduring and ever-evolving stars, whose talents resonate across generations,” the AARP said in a statement on Tuesday.

    Myechia Minter-Jordan, the group’s CEO, called the actor “a Hollywood legend whose remarkable career has set a new standard for comedic storytelling, captivating audiences across generations.

    “Adam’s enduring success, his ability to reinvent himself, inspire laughter, and move us through dramatic performances is a testament to the power of creativity at every age,” Minter-Jordan said.

    AARP launched the Movies for Grownups initiative in 2002 to advocate for audiences over 50, fight ageism in Hollywood and promote movies “for grownups, by grownups.”

    Actor Alan Cumming will host the ceremony in Beverly Hills on Jan. 10, to be broadcast by “Great Performances” on PBS in February.

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  • ‘Awards Chatter’ Pod: George Clooney on ‘Jay Kelly,’ Stardom, Instagram (“Get the F*** Off”), AI and the Next Gen of Stars

    “This never felt like a story about a movie star to me,” George Clooney says as we sit down at West Hollywood’s Sunset Tower hotel to record an episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast — on which he last guested in 2019 — ahead of the release of Jay Kelly, the new Noah Baumbach dramedy in which Clooney plays the title character, a movie star experiencing an existential crisis. “This felt like a story about almost every one of us who has had to balance work and life.”

    Even so, Jay Kelly — which has been a hit on the fall film fest circuit en route to its theatrical release on Nov. 14 and Netflix debut on Dec. 5, and for which Clooney could earn the fifth acting Oscar nomination of his distinguished career — raises a lot of interesting questions about stardom. And few people alive today are more qualified to discuss the subject than Clooney, who has been an A-lister for more than three decades.

    Like Jay Kelly, Clooney was born in Kentucky, came to Hollywood, caught a few breaks and became a critical and commercial darling sometimes described as “the last movie star,” despite a handful of contrarians occasionally accusing him of playing himself. Unlike Kelly, Clooney hasn’t shown a blatant disregard for the people around him — he is widely known in the business to be highly considerate to his “team,” generous to his friends (once gifting 14 of them checks for $1 million), attentive to his parents and, after many years as a bachelor, a loving husband and father.

    Baumbach says he wrote the role of Kelly for Clooney and would not have made the film if Clooney had declined it — something that many other movie stars might have done, out of fear that the public might assume that a character that resembled them in so many ways — right down to the film featuring a montage of Kelly’s past work that consists of clips of Clooney’s past work — was actually a reflection of them in all ways.

    Clooney said that “wasn’t really a consideration” for him, in part because he is comfortable in his own skin and in part because Baumbach only added some of those details after Clooney signed on. “He added the Kentucky thing and a couple of those things as we were shooting. He kept looking at my life and adding things, and I was like, ‘Take it easy.’” As for the montage featuring clips of his own films? “I was shocked by that,” he admits, but he was not upset. He has learned to take these sorts of things in stride. “When I did Up in the Air, there were all these conversations about how [the character] was very similar to me, and it was — there were things that I had said like, ‘I don’t ever want to get married again’ and all those kind of things.”

    How did Clooney avoid becoming like Jay Kelly in his own life? He insists it’s all about when and how they each became famous. Of Kelly, Clooney says, “He was famous too young. He’s been surrounded by a team of people who have said ‘yes’ to him … He’s not an evil guy; he’s just oblivious.” Clooney, however, was already 33 by the time he became famous, old enough to have experienced a normal life first — something that he says had not been the case for his own late aunt, the singer Rosemary Clooney, whose resulting troubles he observed up close.

    Also, Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” Clooney agrees. “I got famous from television, not from movies,” he emphasizes. “You watched me at home, and you could make me talk or not talk with the remote, and you’d watch me in your underwear, and you knew me personally, so I was very much accessible in that way.”

    In those days, the worlds of film and TV were much more segregated, and it was virtually unheard of for someone who had first become famous as a TV star to subsequently become a movie star. Clooney was no exception, at first: “I’d done five or six films while I was doing ER, some very good ones, that didn’t succeed — Out of Sight didn’t succeed, Three Kings didn’t succeed — and so the big question was, ‘Am I going to make it in the movies?’ And the answer was no — until I left ER. The next two movies I had were sort of a perfect combination of The Perfect Storm — which was a big hit having nothing to do with me, but listen, I took a lot of shit for Batman & Robin, so I’ll take credit for the big wave — and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which was a critical hit.”

    After that, he was off to the races, starring in hits like 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven and its 2004 and 2007 sequels but far more often in art house fare, including 2005’s Syriana, for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar; 2007’s Michael Clayton, 2009’s Up in the Air and 2011’s The Descendants, each of which brought him best actor Oscar nominations. He also began writing, directing and producing quality films, some of which he appeared in, others not — he received best director and best original screenplay Oscar noms for 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck, in which he played a supporting part; a best adapted screenplay Oscar nom for 2011’s The Ides of March, in which he also played a supporting part; and he won a best picture Oscar for producing 2012’s Argo, in which he did not appear at all.

    Incidentally, he says that he did want to play the leads in Good Night, and Good Luck and Argo, but came to realize that he should not. “I wrote Good Night, and Good Luck to play Murrow,” he says, referring to TV newsman Edward R. Murrow, “and we did a table reading and I looked at Grant [Heslov, his best friend and co-writer on that project] and said, ‘I don’t have the gravitas to play that character yet.’ I was too young, which was really disappointing because I really wanted to play the part. David Strathairn, of course, knocked it out of the park. But I still had to be in the film to keep the financing.” As for Argo? “I was supposed to play the lead in Argo, but when [Ben Affleck] came on to direct it, he said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to play that part.’ And I was like, ‘Shit.’”

    Since Clooney last was on this podcast — back when he was promoting 2019’s Catch-22, a Hulu limited series on which he was an executive producer and director, and in which he also played a supporting role — he has been working nonstop. He directed three films — 2020’s The Midnight Sky, 2021’s The Tender Bar and 2023’s The Boys in the Boat) — the first of which he also starred in. He also starred in a rom-com opposite Julia Roberts (2022’s Ticket to Paradise) and a heist film opposite Brad Pitt (2024’s Wolfs). Thirty nine years after he last acted on stage, he made his Broadway debut playing the aforementioned Murrow in a theatrical adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck, garnering a best actor in a play Tony nom. And he made Jay Kelly, of which he is obviously immensely proud.

    * * *

    George Clooney’s thoughts…

    On social media

    “I talk to kids all the time. I talk to kids at SAG and things, and they’re all on Instagram and everything. And when I was directing and I was casting, and it was between two actors, the casting director and the studio would come to me and go, ‘Well, she’s got 175,000 followers on Instagram, and the other girl’s got 30,000.’ Those were literally the discussions we had. And I said to all these actors, ‘Get the fuck off of it. Get off of all of it. Because if you’re not on it, you have nothing to be compared to.’ And that access, I get it — you can monetize it, you can drink a certain kind of water and they’ll pay you 10 grand, and fair enough, I get it, I understand it. But trying to maintain a career and answer all of the questions that every individual has for you, it’s diminishing your ability to be bigger than life. It’s inevitable, and I’m sort of swimming upstream, and I don’t think that there’s much you can do about it, but I do think it’s better to not be as available.”

    On AI

    “It’s very disturbing, some of the stuff you’re seeing. … I’ve seen stuff with me in it that’s pretty disturbing, stuff that I ‘said’ that I never said, telling, you know, great stories about Hitler and stuff like that, where you just go, ‘Jesus Christ.’ But I will say that AI is gonna have the same problem that Hollywood has always had, which is it’s still hard to find a movie star.”

    On younger stars who impress him

    “I think Zendaya … can do television, she can do commercials, she can do movies, she seems to have that ability to rise above it. I think Glen Powell is doing interesting stuff as a young actor; he’s kind of hitting around the time I hit, and he seems to want to direct and produce and write and do all of those things with a little bit of humor about himself, which I think is an element that’s important if you look back. I’m not ready to call it all dead yet.”

    On failure versus regret

    “You can live with failure. What you cannot live with is regret. You can’t live with that road that you didn’t try when you think ‘that could have been something special,’ because you can’t go back, and that is toxic. And that, to me, is something that I happily don’t have in my life. If I get hit by a bus when I walk outside after this interview, there’s not one person who knows me or who’s been around me that wouldn’t think, ‘Well, he pretty much got everything you could get out of it.’ I’m the most successful version of where I started, cutting tobacco for $3 an hour, that I ever thought I’d be, and not just in work as an actor, but also in life. I have a beautiful wife and wonderful children and great friends and a great family. And I’ve worked at those things. But I also had made sure that wherever there was a fork in the road, I took the one that I thought was the riskiest and not the safest. And it worked out. It could have not. I could live with that. What I couldn’t live with is having not taken that road.”

    Scott Feinberg

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  • George Clooney Wanted Adam Sandler to Be Taken Seriously on the Set of ‘Jay Kelly’ and Not Be “Making Fun of His Incredible Talent”

    For their new movie, Jay Kelly, George Clooney had a special rule on set: he didn’t want the cast referring to Adam Sandler by his nickname “Sandman,” in an effort to take the comedian more seriously as an actor.

    At the film’s AFI Fest premiere on Thursday, Clooney explained that reasoning to The Hollywood Reporter, saying, “You get treated the way you treat yourself. This was a different kind of role for Adam, and I wanted to make sure that he wasn’t making fun of his incredible talent. He likes to just deflect and I was like, ‘You know what, dude, you’re really good in this film and you’re a really good actor and let’s not just make jokes.’”

    In the Netflix movie, Clooney plays movie star Jay Kelly, who has a sudden wake-up call about his life and goes on a trip through Europe with his devoted manager Ron (Sandler).

    Sandler joked in response to Clooney’s rule, “I still call myself the Sandman; he can’t stop me,” but he did appreciate the gesture. “He just is very protective over me. He’s a really nice guy,” he continued of Clooney. “We would do all these scenes together and we’d get deep together and he’d say, ‘I just want people to recognize that’ and I’d say, ‘I’m OK, I like just working hard,’ and he’d say, ‘No.’ He’s very nice, he’s trying to look out for me.”

    Noah Baumbach, along with co-writer Emily Mortimer, wrote the role specifically for Sandler, as the actor explained the film as less a Hollywood-set story but for “everybody who works and tries to do the best they can at work and the sacrifice that takes on your family and on yourself; things you miss out on when you jump into something and you’re deep into something and that stuff’s going on over there — you tend to go what’s more important, this or that? And it’s a struggle.”

    Greta Gerwig plays Sandler’s wife in the film, and along with “Greta’s son and my daughter, we were one nice family together,” Sandler added of their characters. “Greta was fantastic; Greta was so nice to my daughter Sadie — they did a lot of scenes together and they got very close.”

    Baumbach, who is married to Gerwig in real life, said he identified “fairly early” that she would play the role: “I basically said to Greta, ‘Who are you going to play?’” He confirmed that she has early dibs on parts, joking, “I mean, she couldn’t play Jay Kelly or Ron, but she could play pretty much anyone else.”

    Jay Kelly hits select theaters on Nov. 14 and starts streaming on Netflix Dec. 5.

    Kirsten Chuba

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  • ‘Jay Kelly’ Trailer: George Clooney Examines His Life With Help From Adam Sandler

    George Clooney examines his life and what it all means in the trailer for Noah Baumbach‘s upcoming film Jay Kelly.

    Netflix released the first full trailer for its awards hopeful on Monday. The official logline for the film, via Netflix: “Jay Kelly follows famous movie actor, Jay Kelly (George Clooney), as he embarks on a journey of self discovery confronting both his past and present, accompanied by his devoted manager Ron (Adam Sandler). Poignant and humor filled, epic and intimate, Jay Kelly is pitched at the intersection of life’s regrets and notable glories.”

    The trailer starts out with Jay saying: “I don’t want to be here anymore.… I want to leave the party.”

    His daughter reveals she’s going to Paris, and Kelly decides to follow her to France, with Ron and his publicist (Laura Dern) in tow.

    “Lately I feel like my life doesn’t really feel real,” Jay tells Ron. “Suddenly, I’m remembering things. What is that?”

    “Memory?” Ron asks.

    “It’s like a movie where I’m playing myself,” Jay muses.

    The movie, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, will be released in select theaters Nov. 14 and on Netflix on Dec. 5.

    In addition to directing, Baumbach wrote the script with Emily Mortimer and served as producer with David Heyman and Amy Pascal. The cast also includes Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Grace Edwards, Stacy Keach, Jim Broadbent, Patrick Wilson, Eve Hewson, Greta Gerwig, Alba Rohrwacher, Josh Hamilton, Lenny Henry, Emily Mortimer, Nicôle Lecky, Thaddea Graham, Isla Fisher, Louis Partridge and Charlie Rowe. 

    Watch the trailer below.

    Kimberly Nordyke

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  • Virginia Film Fest: Lineup Announced, ‘Jay Kelly’ Composer Nicholas Britell to Guest on Live Episode of THR’s ‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast (Exclusive)

    The TV shows Succession, Andor and The Underground Railroad. The movies Moonlight, Don’t Look Up and The Big Short. And the list goes on. Few composers, if any, have made a bigger mark on 21st century screen entertainment than Nicholas Britell. In recognition of his prodigious achievements, the 44-year-old Emmy winner and Oscar and Grammy nominee will be honored by the Virginia Film Festival with its Achievement in Film Composition Award on Friday, Oct. 24, immediately following a screening of the latest film that he scored, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, and a live recording of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast with yours truly, at the Paramount Theater.

    “We are honored and thrilled to welcome Nicholas Britell to the Virginia Film Festival,” Ilya Tovbis, the fest’s artistic director, said in a statement. “His groundbreaking compositions and scores have deepened and enriched our experience of such seminal works as Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, and of course Succession. Britell is one of the most important, innovative, and daring musicians working in cinema today, and his collaboration with Noah Baumbach on Jay Kelly is another stellar example of the moving and affecting sound that we’ve come to love and expect from this treasure of American music.”

    The fest, a program of the University of Virginia, also shared with THR the full lineup for its 38th edition, which will take place Oct. 22-26 in Charlottesville. The fest’s opening night film will be Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere; its centerpiece film will be Train Dreams; and its closing night film will be Rental Family. Other high-profile screenings, in addition to Jay Kelly, will include Christy, Frankenstein, La Grazia, Hamnet, Hedda, It Was Just an Accident, Left-Handed Girl, No Other Choice, Nouvelle Vague, A Private Life, The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value.

    In addition to Britell, other prominent members of the film community who are set to attend the fest include production designer Cara Brower (Hedda, who will receive the Craft Award for Production Design); actor Miles Caton (Sinners), who will receive the Achievement in Film Music Award; actor/writer/director Jay Duplass (The Baltimorons), who, with his collaborator Michael Strassner, will receive the Achievement in Screenwriting Award; casting director Alexa Fogel; actor Ben Foster (Christy), who will receive the Achievement in Acting Award; writer/director Hikari (Rental Family); TCM host Ben Mankiewicz; and writer/producer/executive James Schamus, who will receive the Impresario Award.

    Scott Feinberg

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  • Montclair Film Fest to Open With ‘Jay Kelly,’ Close With Sydney Sweeney-Starrer ‘Christy’ and Feature Brendan Fraser-Starring ‘Rental Family’ (Exclusive)

    The 2025 Montclair Film Festival has set its opening night, centerpiece and closing night films.

    The 14th annual New Jersey event, set to run from Oct. 17-26, will open with Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler and Laura Dern; close with David Michôd’s Christy, starring Sydney Sweeney as real-life West Virginia boxer Christy Martin; and screen Hikari’s Rental Family, starring Brendan Fraser, as its fiction centerpiece movie. And the festival will screen Ryan White’s Come See Me in the Good Light as its documentary centerpiece film.

    Netflix’s Jay Kelly follows Clooney’s titular movie star and his manager, played by Sandler, as they reflect on their life choices, relationships and legacies during a whirlwind journey through Europe. The movie will screen on Friday Oct. 17 at the Wellmont Theater and is set to hit theaters on Nov. 14 ahead of a Dec. 5 Netflix bow.

    The following week, festivalgoers can catch Apple TV+’s documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, which tells the love story of poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley amid Gibson’s battle with terminal cancer. Gibson died in July. Come See Me in the Good Light will screen on Friday, Oct. 24 at The Montclair Kimberley Academy Upper School ahead of its Nov. 14 release date.

    Searchlight’s Rental Family sees Brendan Fraser’s actor character work for a Japanese “rental family” agency, as he joins strangers’ worlds and forms real connections. The movie will screen on Saturday, Oct. 25 before its Nov. 21 release date.

    Black Bear’s Christy tells the true story of West Virginia boxer Christy Martin (Sweeney) as she fights both inside and outside of the ring to reclaim her life. The movie also stars Ben Foster, Merritt Wever, Katy O’Brian and Ethan Embry and will screen on Sunday, Oct. 26 at The Montclair Kimberley Academy Upper School. Christy is set to get a Nov. 7 release.

    “We are so excited to announce the opening, closing and centerpiece films of the 2025 Montclair Film Festival,” Montclair Film artistic director Tom Hall said in a statement. “This year’s program reflects the vital role filmmakers play in shaping our culture, and we look forward to continuing to engage our community through the power of film. I cannot wait to share these movies with our audiences.”

    The Montclair Film Festival has long been supported by Stephen Colbert and his wife, Evelyn McGee Colbert, who serves as the president of Montclair Film’s board of trustees, with the Late Show host on an advisory board with J.J. Abrams, Jonathan Alter, Jon Stewart, Richard Curtis, Abigail Disney, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Patrick Wilson, Laura Linney, Julie Taymor and others.

    Stephen Colbert regularly participates in Q&A’s with actors, writers and directors as part of Montclair Film’s programming.

    Hilary Lewis

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  • Telluride Awards Analysis: ‘Hamnet,’ ‘Sentimental Value’ Join ‘Sinners’ Atop List of Oscar Frontrunners

    The 52nd Telluride Film Festival is now in the books. Margot Robbie, Ryan Coogler, Oprah Winfrey, David Oyelowo, Rian Johnson, Janet Yang, Kathy Kennedy and Frank Marshall were among those who came just to watch movies. Screenings were introduced with a group meditation (Chloé Zhao), a song (Jesse Plemons) and a wave (man of few words Bruce Springsteen). Adam Sandler and Emma Stone posed for photos in the streets with ecstatic local schoolkids. And the Oscar race came into clearer focus.

    Below, you can read my biggest awards-related takeaways from the fest.

    Four high-profile films that already have U.S. distribution had their world premieres in Telluride: Ballad of a Small Player (Netflix), Bugonia (Focus), Hamnet (Focus) and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (20th Century). How did they go over?

    Focus has plenty of cause for celebration, as both Bugonia and Hamnet played like gangbusters and look almost certain to land Oscar noms for best picture and plenty else.

    Zhao’s Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling 2020 novel of the same name, which centers on the Shakespeare family and its tragic loss that allegedly inspired the play Hamlet, garnered rave reviews (it’s at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 95 percent on Metacritic), including particularly strong notices for leading lady Jessie Buckley, who plays William’s wife Agnes. Some are already proclaiming it to be the best picture Oscar frontrunner. I certainly think it will be a big factor in the season. I would just caution that numerous Academy members quietly expressed to me their feeling that the film has tonal issues — some called it “trauma porn” — and that it has been so hyped by critics that other Academy members will inevitably feel disappointed when they catch up with it. We’ll see.

    As for Bugonia, which reunites filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and actress/producer Stone in a dark comedy about people who “do their own research,” reactions have been nearly as enthusiastic. It played, for me, like a high-end Black Mirror episode — I mean that as a major compliment — and it also has been likened to a prior off-the-wall Lanthimos/Stone collab, Poor Things. Like that 2023 film, it could land multiple acting noms (Stone and Plemons are great), if less recognition for below-the-line work.

    Scott Cooper’s Springsteen, meanwhile, is not what a lot of people expected it to be — a jukebox musical in the vein of Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman or Elvis — but rather an examination of the causes and effects of a deep depression that engulfed The Boss (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) in the early 1980s and resulted in his iconoclastic 1982 album Nebraska. It remains to be seen if/how that will impact the film’s box office appeal, but reviews have been solid, and White and Jeremy Strong, who plays Springsteen’s manager, stand a real shot at lead and supporting actor Oscar noms, respectively.

    Then there’s Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player, which comes a year after Conclave and three years after All Quiet on the Western Front, Berger films that were of a large scale and about matters of social import (and landed a bunch of Oscar noms, including best picture). Ballad is neither of those things — it’s about a gambling addict in present-day Macao who grows increasingly desperate as his luck runs out — and the no-holds-barred performance of its lead actor, Colin Farrell, is its best bet for a nom.

    Of films that came directly from world premiering in Venice to make their North American debut in the Rockies, did anything pop?

    Yes, La Grazia (Mubi) and Jay Kelly (Netflix). And it was striking to me how differently people reacted to those two films in Telluride versus in Venice.

    Ironically, La Grazia, the Italian film that opened both fests, was far better received in America. The seventh collab between filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino and actor Toni Servillo, it centers on an Italian president during the last six months of his term. (Maybe Americans were just happy to be reminded that dignified leaders still exist?) I suspect that Italy will eventually submit it for the best international feature Oscar, as it previously did two other Sorrentino films, 2013’s The Great Beauty (which won) and 2022’s The Hand of God, and also that Servillo could make a run at a long-overdue first Oscar nom.

    A similar thing happened with Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, a film about a movie star (George Clooney) who experiences an existential crisis that forces him and his “team” to question their life choices. It was written off on the Lido, but rebounded in a major way — along with its Rotten Tomatoes score — in Telluride, where Baumbach was fêted with a career tribute, Billy Crudup’s big scene received mid-movie applause at each screening, Adam Sandler cemented his status as a frontrunner for the best supporting actor Oscar, and Clooney, who was absent due to illness, was talked up by his collaborators. I think the film is tailor-made for the Academy.

    The reverse sort of happened with Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which played through the roof in Venice — it got a 14-minute standing ovation — and then came to Telluride as a surprise late-night screening, and engendered a more muted response. It’s certainly well made, with a knockout score by the great Alexandre Desplat that the Academy’s music branch will surely nominate. But, even given how much people love del Toro, I think that the film’s bloated story and runtime (two-and-a-half hours, versus 70 minutes for the 1931 original) will make it hard for it to crack the top Oscar categories.

    What about films from earlier fests, including Sundance, Berlin and Cannes?

    In Telluride, as far as I could discern, only one film accumulated as many hardcore fans as Hamnet, and that was the Norwegian dramedy Sentimental Value (Neon), which reunites Oscar nominee The Worst Person in the World’s filmmaker Joachim Trier and actress Renate Reinsve, and which won Cannes’ Grand Prix (second-place award). Festival attendees ate it up, to the extent that I think it deserves to be grouped with Coogler’s Sinners (Warner Bros.) and Hamnet in the top tier of best picture contenders.

    Like Jay Kelly, Sentimental Value is about a filmmaker who neglected his family in order to focus on his career — a character played by the veteran Swedish thespian Stellan Skarsgård, who will probably duke it out with Sandler for the best supporting actor Oscar. Unlike Jay Kelly, Sentimental Value also devotes a significant amount of attention to the filmmaker’s children, played by Reinsve (who I see as neck and neck with Buckley for best actress at the moment) and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Elle Fanning also stars.

    Neon also had two other films — both political thrillers — that were celebrated at Cannes and then proved popular in Telluride, as well.

    Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, which underscores how the brutality of Iran’s current regime haunts the republic’s citizens, won Cannes’ Palme d’Or over Sentimental Value, and was widely admired here as well. (Panahi, visiting the U.S. for the first time in nearly 20 years, enlisted the audience at one screening to join him in recording a video singing “Happy Birthday” to his script consultant, Mehdi Mahmoudian, who is currently incarcerated in Iran, as Panahi himself was until recently.) Obviously, Iran will not submit It Was Just an Accident for the best international feature Oscar, but France, from which the film drew much of its financing, might. More on that in a moment.

    People also couldn’t stop raving about Wagner Moura, the Brazilian best known for TV’s Narcos, who was awarded Cannes’ best actor prize for his tour-de-force turn in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. Moura should not be underestimated in the best actor Oscar race, and Brazil, which won best international feature last year with I’m Still Here, might well make another run for it with this smart and funny epic.

    The film that is probably an even bet with It Was Just an Accident to be the French entry is Nouvelle Vague (Netflix), Richard Linklater’s black-and-white homage to the French New Wave. Cineastes loved it in Cannes — I was shocked that it wasn’t awarded a single prize there — and again in Telluride, ahead of which I discussed it with Linklater.

    Other titles that came to Telluride and held their own, even if they didn’t set the world on fire, were, via Cannes, The History of Sound (A24), The Mastermind (Mubi), A Private Life (Sony Classics), Pillion (A24) and Urchin (1-2 Special); via Berlin, Blue Moon (Sony Classics); and via Sundance, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (A24).

    What about the sales titles?

    THR exclusively broke the news of the two deals that have come out of the fest thus far: Netflix bought Oscar nominee Joshua Seftel’s All the Empty Rooms, a powerful doc short about an effort to memorialize children killed in school shootings; and Amazon/MGM nabbed Oscar winner Morgan Neville’s energizing doc feature about Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles life, Man on the Run.

    Of the films that are still on the table, I’ve heard a lot of enthusiasm for Tuner, the narrative directorial debut of Navalny Oscar winner Daniel Roher, which stars Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman; one Academy member even likened it to Whiplash. Hamlet, Aneil Karia‘s reimagining of the Shakespeare play in present-day London, is all about Riz Ahmed’s compelling performance as the title character, and will probably find a buyer. And Philippa Lowthorpe’s H Is for Hawk features a committed turn by the great Claire Foy as a falconer, but is way too long at 130 minutes; I suspect that any potential partner will insist on tightening it up.

    Among the distributorless documentaries that played at the fest, the most talked about was surely Ivy Meeropol’s Ask E. Jean, a portrait of the former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault and twice won legal judgments against him — but is any potential distributor willing to risk the wrath of Trump? I hope and suspect so.

    Mark Obenhaus and Citizenfour Oscar winner Laura Poitras’ Cover-Up profiles another muckraker, Seymour Hersh, and won a lot of admirers both in Venice, where it debuted, and in Telluride. I heard a lot of chatter about The White Helmets Oscar winner Orlando von Einsiedel’s tearjerker The Cycle of Love. And if the turnout of doc branch Academy members at screenings of Robb Moss’ The Bend in the River is any indication, it, too, will soon find a home.

    The bottom line

    Much of the awards-industrial complex, including yours truly, has just returned home from Telluride, and is laying low today and tomorrow before decamping to Canada for the 50th Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday. There, many titles that played in Telluride will resurface. A few that debuted in Venice but then skipped Telluride will have their North American premieres, including The Smashing Machine (A24) and The Testament of Ann Lee (still seeking U.S. distribution). And most excitingly, the Canadians will host the world premieres of a bunch of potential awards contenders, including Rental Family (Searchlight), The Lost Bus (Apple), Hedda (Amazon/MGM), Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Netflix), Roofman (Paramount) and Christy (still seeking U.S. distribution).

    There are 194 days, or six months and 13 days, between now and the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 15, 2026. A lot can still happen. Stay tuned.

    Scott Feinberg

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  • Telluride: ‘Jay Kelly’ Team on Clooney and Stardom, Sandler’s Soulful Turn and Crudup’s Crazy Scene

    Due to illness, George Clooney couldn’t make it to this year’s Telluride Film Festival for the North American premiere of Jay Kelly, a film that centers on a movie star (Clooney) who experiences an existential crisis that prompts him to take a spur-of-the-moment trip to Europe to see his daughter and accept a career tribute from a film festival, and his “team,” who are expected to drop everything to support him. But a large coterie of Clooney’s collaborators on the film were in town — among them co-writer/director Noah Baumbach, actors Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup and Patrick Wilson, and composer Nicholas Britell — and basked in the warm reception and awards chatter that greeted the Netflix title at its four festival screenings, two of which followed career tributes to Baumbach.

    On Sunday, following one of those screenings, I sat down with the aforementioned group for a wide-ranging Q&A. We discussed why Baumbach and Emily Mortimer wrote the part of Kelly with Clooney in mind, and why it was a gutsy decision for the A-lister to agree to take it on; what Sandler drew upon to formulate his portrayal of Kelly’s manager, Ron, for which the Sand-man is receiving some of the best reviews of his career and looks like a strong bet to land his first Oscar nom; how Crudup, who plays a former acting school classmate of Kelly’s, Timothy, prepared for his brief but complex scene in the film, which elicited mid-movie applause at every screening; plus more.

    A transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity and brevity, appears below.

    * * *

    Noah, what was the root of the idea for this film, which you co-wrote with Emily Mortimer? Also, some might wonder: why center it on a famous movie star rather than, say, a famous writer-director who also occasionally receives career tributes of his own?

    BAUMBACH Well, we needed some barrier. [laughs] I don’t know, I found it compelling, this notion of a movie star who has some kind of crisis and goes on a journey — an actual journey into the world, and also a journey into himself. I had a bunch of ideas, and I didn’t know quite what to do with all of them, and I was talking to Emily about it. She asked all the right questions, and then, just on a whim, I was like, “Do you want to do this with me? If it goes south, we can always just stop.” But it was such a great collaboration. It was a year or so that we really just worked on and shaped the movie.

    My understanding is that you two wrote it with George in mind for the title role, which begs the question: what would you have done if George had said no? I can understand why he might have: Jay Kelly, like George, is an actor from Kentucky, often described as the last “real” movie star, and shares a number of other things in common with him — but Jay also has some attributes that aren’t great, and some people might assume that Jay is George.

    BAUMBACH Well, not to mention what he would have to do in the movie. I mean, it’s a character who’s running from himself, and he’s very good at deflecting and hiding, but as we see in the movie, these memories come at him. We described the memories as “headwinds.” The actor who was playing Jay Kelly had to then start to reveal more of himself, which requires vulnerability. But George said yes within 24 hours, and I knew immediately, when he said yes, that he was going to be amazing, because he knew what was in front of him and what he was going to have to do. To answer your other question, I don’t know [what we would have done if George had said no]. I think we wouldn’t have made the movie. The audience needed to have a history with the actor playing Jay Kelly, the same way the people in the movie have a relationship with Jay Kelly. What George does, as he starts to reveal more and more, is just beautiful to watch.

    There’s another actor in this film who we’ve known and loved for decades — actually several — and not all of this guy’s movies have gotten the critical respect that Jay Kelly is getting, but he’s brought a lot of people a lot of joy over a lot of years—

    SANDLER Patrick Wilson! [laughs]

    But I’m not sure that he has gotten the credit that he deserves for stretching himself as much as he has in films like Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, Reign Over Me, Noah’s film The Meyerowitz Stories, Uncut Gems and Hustle. Noah, for the part of Ron, why did you go back to Adam Sandler?

    BAUMBACH Adam and I fell in love with each other on The Meyerowitz Stories — we became very close; our families are close and love each other; and my son, Rohmer, who’s here, basically lives at Adam’s house half the year. The character of Ron, I wrote for Adam — even though you might think that Adam is more like Jay Kelly [because he’s a movie star] — because of the way Adam is in the world, with his heart and his generosity and his loyalty. The people who work with him have been with him since the beginning, and the way he is with his family is so beautiful. I felt like, “Well, that’s what Ron is like, and Adam, in a way, could play something that is close to him, but in disguise.” That was really exciting to me, and also a way to pay tribute to the Adam I know and love.

    SANDLER That’s beautiful. Thank you.

    Adam, I’d love to hear what your reaction was when you saw what Noah had written for you. But also, having been in the business for as long as you have, you’ve had an up-close view of the actor/manager relationship, with all of its friend/employee complexities, and I wondered if that particularly informed the way you approached this guy?

    SANDLER First of all, thank you to Noah for this part — Noah, you’re a great man, and all of us thank you. What a guy he is. He writes the most beautiful lines, and we get to say them, so thank you. Yes, over the years I’ve had a team, similar to Jay Kelly. I have a manager; I have a publicist; I have an agent; I have my makeup girl, Anne — she’s not here tonight, but imagine being her! Imagine every morning going, “What the fuck can I do?!” But I really loved being this guy who just loves his client and feels that they’re in it together — he feels the same successes, and when something goes wrong he feels the same pain. My team feels that way also. When things go wrong, they are definitely shook up. When we have a nice moment, they’re as excited as I am. So I connected with my guy, absolutely.

    Adam, as Noah alluded to, you’ve been exceptionally the opposite of Jay Kelly, in terms of casting people that you’ve known forever in your films and being very present with your family — I think your whole family was in Happy Gilmore 2 earlier this year! But even with that being the case, has being part of this movie, watching it and thinking about it, made you look at your role as a movie star, or movie stardom in general, any differently than you had before?

    SANDLER I think what the movie is saying is that not just movie stars, but anybody who wants to do their best, has to put time in to their work, and when you do that, you are away from your family, and you know your family’s still going on, and you want to get to them. I definitely have schlepped my family all over the world wherever I go, but there are times when they can’t come. Jay Kelly not getting to be with his family, and looking back and knowing how painful it was for them, is crushing. Even though I’m with my family a lot, I still have moments where it kills me being away. We all do.

    Another person who has some history with Noah — namely, the movie Marriage Story, for which she won an Academy Award — is Laura Dern. Laura, similar to Adam, you’ve been at the highest levels of this business for so many years. Has this film made you think differently about stardom?

    DERN What I love — and Adam spoke so eloquently to it — is the question of the cost of any of our journeys in life, what we might miss. So before Jay Kelly can get to, “I want another one,” there’s the cost for Ron, what he’s lost in life by being of service to Jay. And so my character [Kelly’s publicist] is helping Ron’s journey of getting to the place where he’s also willing to get off the train. And getting to stare into the eyes and work with the face that Anne gets to make up every day was the dream of my life!

    SANDLER We had fun.

    DERN And being back with Noah was a dream because he creates a home, makes you feel the safest you’ve ever been, and gifts you with these people you get to dive right into, even if they’re the very people you’ve been surrounded by your whole life. I, too, have had the good fortune of being surrounded by publicists.

    Billy, it seems to me like your assignment must have fet very daunting: you have to come in and, in a relatively short amount of time, provide the motivation for Jay’s existential crisis. You crushed the Method acting scene. Can you share how you prepared for it, and if that process was any different from the process that you use when, as is often the case, you are the guy who’s at the center of a project?

    CRUDUP Well, thank you. What a gift it was to have Noah come to me with this composition. You have to understand, I’ve been in New York for over 30 years now, and Noah is a fixture of the independent cinema scene there, and every one of my friends has worked with him at some point or another. I was desperate to be in one of Noah’s movies — I was ready for anything — and then I read this and I was like, “Dude, that’s a very hard thing to do! Something I’m not exactly sure how to do. And it seems like the rest of your movie is predicated on that being successful.” [laughs] So, “Are you sure?” was really my question to him, and we had a lot of conversations. Most of my friends are actors, and result-oriented acting — where you just think, “Oh, this is the scene where my character cries” — is anathema to everything that we do. I thought, “That’s going to be a problem.” Noah was very considerate and understanding that I was desperate to work with him, but that I really did not know how to pull this off. I had a whole other version that I had written down to try, and Noah entertained me. Then, about two or three weeks before we were going to shoot this scene, I noticed that the scene hadn’t changed at all, and that I was going to have to figure out some solution. So I started doing research on Method acting, and sure enough, Noah had constructed this scene in such a way that the scene actually plays itself, it leads you in the right direction. That’s a great writer. I don’t know how many takes we did, but it was probably over 50 on both sides — and there wasn’t a second of it that I wasn’t in absolute heaven.

    Patrick, your character, Ben Alcock, another movie star and client of Ron’s, is the antithesis of Jay Kelly in a number of ways. I wonder if you can talk about that, and specifically about the very memorable scene that you shared with Mr. Sandler.

    WILSON I only have two scenes, and I knew nothing about the rest of the script — I mean nothing — until I saw the movie this morning. And Ben didn’t know anything, nor did he need to know anything, so that was an interesting exercise for me, but a glorious one, because the words that I had been given said everything that I needed to know. The scene with George on the side of the road said so much about Ben’s family, his values and how he views his own career. And the scene with Adam? Just working with Adam has been this crazy dream of mine, because I don’t live in the comedy space. It was a double-whammy for me to work with Adam and Noah, two people that I revere so much. It can make you feel uncomfortable when you’re only coming in for a couple of days, but I was given such support by Noah and the crew. And then Adam, you were just so glorious on that day, and made me feel so comfortable. We did 30 different versions with shit flying off the table, and I was looking across the table at this guy who was wiped out every single take. I knew I just had to react and be open. I’ve never had a scene like that. I did have to fire an agent once years ago, but it wasn’t like that! [laughs] Anyway, I just love your [Adam’s] work, and I love your work in this movie.

    We are going to close with the great composer Nicholas Britell, who everyone knows from the theme of Succession, the scores of Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk and Don’t Look Up, and so much else. Nick, I was fascinated to learn that on this project, perhaps unlike any other on which you’ve worked, your music was in place before some of the scenes were even shot.

    BRITELL It’s true. This was something that I’d never done before, getting involved in a project so early. Noah and I met over two years ago, and from the script stage he and I had amazing conversations, and I started trying to imagine the feeling that the movie might have. Then I wrote three of the four main themes of the movie, and Noah invited me to come to Tuscany, and we actually played the music on set for everybody. It was such a special thing for me to sort of absorb the atmosphere. And it was important, I think, for everybody, sort of like osmosis — you feel the world that you’re going to be a part of creating. I just had a blast from start to finish.

    Scott Feinberg

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  • Telluride: Jafar Panahi on Hand, George Clooney Not, as Fest Kicks Off with Patrons Brunch and ‘La Grazia’ Preview

    The 52nd Telluride Film Festival kicked off on Friday with the annual Patrons Brunch, which brings together filmmakers, journalists and the fest’s highest-spending passholders for bacon, eggs and mingling at a private residence high above the center of town.

    Among those present were Jafar Panahi, the Iranian dissident whose It Was Just an Accident (Neon) won Cannes’ Palme d’Or in May, and who this festival helped to bring to the U.S. for the first time in 20 years; E. Jean Carroll, the former advice columnist who later won legal judgments against Pres. Donald Trump, who took a train from New York to attend the world premiere of the documentary feature Ask E. Jean (still seeking U.S. distribution); and two Skarsgårds, Stellan, here with Sentimental Value (Neon), and Alexander, here with Pillion (A24), who told me they will be seeing each other’s movies for the first time here at the fest.

    Topics of conversation ranged widely. There was speculation about what Friday afternoon’s Patrons Preview screening would be (it turned out to be the North American premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, which played very well in the Werner Herzog Theater, led by a great Tony Servillo turn); whether or not Jay Kelly star George Clooney would make it to the fest even though a severe sinus infection caused him to miss festivities earlier this week at the Venice Film Festival (unfortunately he won’t, we have learned); and whether or not Bruce Springsteen, the inspiration for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (Searchlight), would be at the fest in support of that film (the festival confirms: he will!).

    Elsewhere, Ballad of a Small Player (Netflix) star Colin Farrell charmed all comers; Fingernails costars Riz Ahmed, here with Hamlet (still seeking U.S. distribution), and Jessie Buckley, here with Hamnet (Focus), caught up; producer Teddy Schwarzman talked up the two movies he has at the fest, Train Dreams (Netflix) and Tuner (still seeking U.S. distribution); and the trio of Sentimental Value actresses, Elle Fanning, Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, all first-time attendees of the fest, hung out together. Fanning said she would later attend the Merle Haggard documentary Highway 99 A Double Album (still seeking U.S. distribution), which her boyfriend worked on as a producer.

    Meanwhile, two people on polar-opposite sides of the political spectrum chatted beside each other — longtime New Yorker editor David Remnick, who is featured in The New Yorker at 100 (Netflix), and CNBC’s Squawk Box host Joe Kernen, who attends the fest each year with his family. And Annette Insdorf, the Columbia University professor and author who has been attending the fest since 1979, told me that this year, for the first time, she has a film of her own in the fest — indeed, she served as a producer of the documentary Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire (Panorama).

    Scott Feinberg

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