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      ‘Britney vs Spears’ Review: When the Intervention Is the Problem

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      A Netflix documentary directed by Erin Lee Carr offers a timely if vexing primer on the pop star’s legal battle, which may finally be coming to an end.If the makers of “Britney vs Spears” could add one more update to the end of the documentary’s already lengthy text crawl of developments following the film’s completion, they’d have fresh material. On Wednesday, a judge agreed to the suspension of the pop star’s father, James P. Spears, as her conservator.If you have managed to ignore the unfolding story of the conservatorship and the solidarity movement #freebritney, the director Erin Lee Carr’s documentary may serve as a timely if vexing primer. The conservatorship, a legal arrangement that gave the star’s father and others a kind of absolute guardianship over her, was put into place 13 years ago. At the time, it was temporary. The pop music phenom is now 39 years old. In the summer, the battle over the situation hit warp speed.“Britney vs Spears” quickly establishes the magnitude of the performer’s reach with images of packed concerts and rapt fans (so many screaming teenage girls), and clips from her music videos, including the one that put her on the map: “… Baby One More Time” (1998), in which she appeared famously in schoolgirl garb.Relying on a great deal of pickup footage — some from news coverage, some seemingly from hounding paparazzi — “Britney vs Spears” can be dizzying and dismaying. More often, the documentary provides an apt example of what it must be like to be a celebrity surrounded by intimates whose agendas appear murky at best. Throughout, the viewer must factor in a good measure of suspicion. Which declarations are accurate? Which are biased? When are they both? Why did this person agree to an interview?Among those who speak on Spears’s behalf but also have their own freighted relationship with her fame and wealth are her sometime manager and friend Sam Lutfi, who rates high on the ick-scale, and an ex-boyfriend Adnan Ghalib, who met Spears when he was part of the pack of paparazzi chasing her. Even the superfan Jordan Miller, who helped start the #freebritney movement, seems a little too pumped for his adjacent fame.A welcome exception to the iffier interviewees is Tony Chicotel, a lawyer and expert on long-term-care rights and California law. The filmmakers call on him to help navigate the ins and outs of the conservatorship. Like guardianship, the court-appointed conservator role exists to protect people who aren’t able — physically, mentally — to make decisions. (The recent comedy “I Care a Lot” made dark sport of the potential for abuse, with Rosamund Pike playing a court-appointed conservator who preyed on older people.)The journalist Jenny Eliscu, who wrote about Spears for Rolling Stone, plays a significant role in the film (she’s an executive producer). In 2020, the film’s makers received a load of leaked documents about the conservatorship. In a framing device that tries a little too hard to put some distance between “Britney vs Spears” and more exploitative celebrity coverage, Eliscu and the director sit in front of those documents, a Woodward and Bernstein for an Instagram age. (In February, “Framing Britney Spears,” a documentary produced by The New York Times, was released, which I haven’t seen. The same goes for a follow-up, “Controlling Britney Spears.”)To her credit, Carr is transparent about where her sympathies lie. Early on, the camera peruses a girl’s bedroom, focusing in on a pink boombox. The director confesses in voice-over that at 10, she was obsessed with Spears and “… Baby One More Time.” So much so her father, David Carr, asked, “Why are you listening to that song over and over?” Later in the film, Eliscu tears up as she tells the story of secreting a legal document to Spears at a hotel.“Britney vs Spears” underscores how tricky it is to make a credible documentary about a celebrity under duress without repeating many of the gestures that treat fame as the sine qua non of American culture. Even the Oscar-winning documentary “Amy,” a far more elegant dive into a tough pop-music story, could not elude fully the sense that the way it told Amy Winehouse’s story also replicated at times a suspect fascination.This documentary doesn’t dodge the fact that at the time the conservatorship was put in place, there was a great deal unspooling in Spears’s life that had her family concerned about her emotional — and financial — welfare. The year before the court granted James Spears control of his daughter, Britney had divorced Kevin Federline. The couple had two very young sons, who were the subject of custody skirmishes. Amid those tensions, Britney Spears’s behavior was erratic.But what happens when the intervention becomes the problem? The Britney Spears factory — and its myriad subsidiaries — remained robust, golden-goosed by her output. There was a cottage industry of lawyers employed by the conservatorship. The concert footage, the music videos and the clips of Spears rehearsing dance steps all appear to attest to a hard-working ethos and seem to challenge the notion that she could not conduct her affairs. The greatest lesson of “Britney vs Spears” might be how exploitable the role of conservator can become.Still, something remarkable happens at the end of the film. In a deft move, Carr uses excerpts from a recording made at a court hearing in June. After all those talking heads speaking about her, speaking for her, Britney speaks. And what she says has a sorrow and a fury, but also a clarity and defiance.Lisa Kennedy writes on popular culture, race and gender. She lives in Denver, Colo.Britney vs SpearsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Will the Court Address the New Britney Spears Documentaries?

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      Bugging. Restrictions on spending. Failed efforts to hire her own lawyer.In recent days, three new documentaries have come forward with revelations about the degree to which the conservatorship has exerted control over Britney Spears’s life for 13 years — and the extent to which she sought to regain that control early on, without success.On Friday, for example, The New York Times released “Controlling Britney Spears,” which detailed how Ms. Spears’s father and the security firm he hired to protect her ran an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored her communications and secretly captured audio recordings from her bedroom.Ms. Spears’s lawyer called for an investigation, writing in a court filing this week that her father had “crossed unfathomable lines,” further supporting the need to suspend him as her conservator immediately.Early on Tuesday, Netflix started streaming its own film, “Britney Vs Spears,” which used confidential documents and interviews with people who were close with Ms. Spears to detail the singer’s strong objections to the legal arrangement that went on to rule her life, as well as her attempts to escape it.A third documentary, CNN’s “Toxic: Britney Spears’ Battle For Freedom,” aired on Sunday, and included interviews with some of the singer’s friends and former employees. Dan George, who managed the promotional tour for Ms. Spears’s “Circus” album, says in the film that Ms. Spears “could only read Christian books” and “her phone was monitored.”The Times documentary includes an interview with Alex Vlasov, a former employee of a security firm, Black Box, that was hired by Mr. Spears to protect Ms. Spears. Mr. Vlasov, who worked as an executive assistant and operations and cybersecurity manager, said the firm would monitor Ms. Spears’s communications through other devices that were signed into her iCloud account and share them with her father.The surreptitious audio recording, he said, included her interactions and conversations with her boyfriend and children. (It was unclear whether the court had approved these strategies, and both Mr. Spears and the security firm said in statements that their actions were within the law.)The Netflix film, by the filmmaker Erin Lee Carr and featuring the journalist Jenny Eliscu, reported that, very early in the conservatorship, Ms. Spears had attempted to hire her own lawyer to help her escape the strict limitations of the conservatorship.Ms. Spears is heard on a 2009 voice mail addressing a lawyer, who is not identified, seeking reassurance that her effort to end the conservatorship would not jeopardize her right to time with her two sons. At the time, about a year into the conservatorship, Ms. Spears was represented by a court-appointed lawyer after a judge determined that she did not have the capacity to choose her own.Ms. Eliscu, who said that she knew Ms. Spears after profiling her twice for Rolling Stone, recounts a time when Sam Lufti, Ms. Spears’s friend and sometime manager, asked her to surreptitiously present court papers for the singer to sign; the papers stated that Ms. Spears’s court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, was not “advocating adequately on her behalf.” Ms. Eliscu said she met Ms. Spears in the bathroom of a hotel and the singer signed the document, but her wishes were not granted.Ms. Spears was represented by Mr. Ingham until July, when a judge ruled that she could choose her own lawyer.Watch The New York Times documentary that highlighted the “Free Britney” movement, which supports the pop star Britney Spears’s efforts to get out of a 13-year court-sanctioned conservatorship.G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times More

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      A Specialist in Short and Lethal Movie Thrillers Jumps to TV

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      The French director Julien Leclercq’s action movies are known for their ruthless economy. His new Netflix thriller, “Ganglands,” tests his approach across six episodes.Mehdi, the cool, collected thief at the heart of the French Netflix series “Ganglands,” is haunted by his brother’s death. Guilt drives Mehdi’s decisions as he becomes embroiled in a violent dispute among rival drug traffickers.And yet we know nothing about that lost sibling. The show doesn’t dwell on how he died. There are no convenient explanations or evocative flashbacks.“We did write those scenes, but we thought we shouldn’t underestimate viewers,” said Julien Leclercq, the series’s director and co-creator, speaking in French on a recent video call from Paris. “It’s not a bad thing to leave a back story to the imagination, to not always explain.”And this is why his movies have one of the lowest B.M.I.s in the action business: He cuts the flab. Since his debut, the 2007 sci-fi thriller “Chrysalis” (running time: 1 hour 34 minutes), he has built a reputation as a director of efficient, no-nonsense rides. Even when he lands international names, like Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 2019 film “The Bouncer” (also 1:34) or Olga Kurylenko in the 2021 Netflix film “Sentinelle” (good to go at 1:20), Leclercq resists the temptation to give them more dialogue, more exposition or more fights.The question was, could Leclercq’s formula work across the four and a half hours of “Ganglands,” which premiered on Netflix last week?Sami Bouajila, whose turn as Mehdi in the series was his fourth outing with the director, didn’t need convincing.Sami Bouajila, who has worked with Leclerqc several times before, plays a cool, collected thief in “Ganglands.” Sofie Gheysens/Netflix “It was love at first sight — we were on the same wavelength, we had the same approach,” said Bouajila, a popular big-screen leading man in France whose performance in the film “A Son” earned him the 2021 César Award for best actor.“We both love these silent, upstanding characters, a little rough around the edges, and I love his aesthetics,” he added. “Julien’s trademark is his artistic direction — there’s a rhythm, there’s a sound, and there’s silence. There are moods and feelings but the characters have a hard time expressing them, so they act upon them.”This “show, don’t tell” approach may be one reason Leclercq’s austere style, somewhere between Jean-Pierre Melville and Clint Eastwood, needs little translation: There are few subtitles to discourage those allergic to them. His films have performed so well internationally for Netflix that the company, which had historically only licensed Leclercq’s movies for streaming, signed on as the primary distributor for his 2020 feature, “Earth and Blood” (1:20).Leclercq’s work can feel like a single locomotive speeding ahead on straight rails — the entire plot of “Earth and Blood” boils down to an extended showdown between a sawmill owner and dealers looking for a stolen stash. With its expanded parameters, however, the “Ganglands” engine can pull a few more cars.As usual, the core of the story is simple: Shaïnez (Sofia Lesaffre) is abducted after she and her girlfriend, Liana (Tracy Gotoas), impulsively steal drugs from the wrong guy, and only Shaïnez’s uncle, Mehdi, can help set her free. But now there is room for the human foibles and interpersonal dynamics — and even hints at back stories — that Leclercq usually dispenses with.Tracy Gotoas, left, and Sofia Lesaffre play lovers who get into deep trouble after stealing drugs from the wrong guy. Caroline Dubois/Netflix “We quickly latched on the idea of a family tragedy, very much in a Greek tragedy mold, which is what links all the characters,” said Hamid Hlioua the show’s co-creator and co-writer, adding that adding this angle was also a way to avoid simply diluting a movie. “We wanted to focus on tension, action and family.”“Ganglands” certainly operates on a larger scale than is typical for Leclercq. But Netflix trusted that he could be just as efficient over six episodes instead of tightly coiled in an hour and a half, and approached him with the idea. The director was interested in the challenge.“I think all filmmakers today have fantasies of tackling a series,” said Leclercq, 42, a burly, loquacious man sporting tattooed knuckles. “For viewers, they are really exciting. I’ve watched ‘True Detective’ five times, ‘Breaking Bad’ three times.”Still, Leclercq and Hlioua were conscious that bloat would be a constant threat. “Very often when there are eight episodes you feel that you could get rid of one or two,” Hlioua said. “So we wanted to grab the viewer from the start and not let go until the last episode.”In French, the series has the same title, “Braqueurs,” as a Leclercq movie from 2015, known in the United States as “The Crew” (1:21). In both, Bouajila, 55, plays the stone-faced, charismatic leader of a thieving ring, but they are not the same characters and the story lines are unrelated.“We tried to amplify every aspect,” Leclercq said. “‘The Crew’ was set in a Parisian suburb and involved kilos of coke. Now we’re in Brussels and in the port of Antwerp, which is a hub for drugs coming from South America, and we’re not dealing with kilos anymore, but with tons. The bad guys are more powerful.”“It’s not a bad thing to leave a back story to the imagination, to not always explain,” Leclercq said.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesIn his feature work, keeping the productions lean has been a key to maintaining the crispness of his pacing and aesthetic. He recalled shuddering when Van Damme turned up with a whole team in tow for “The Bouncer.”“I said to myself — and he knows that, I told him — that he was going to be a pain in the butt, his world was going to be a pain in the butt, his entourage was going to be a pain in the butt, and I could mess up the movie if he doesn’t listen to me,” Leclercq said.He took Van Damme aside and asked him to let go of all those showbiz accouterments; it worked.“In the middle of the shoot he told me, ‘I’ve learned to love making movies again — I was a star, now I want to be an actor,’ ” Leclercq said. “That was the greatest compliment he could have given me.” (Van Damme is, indeed, extraordinary.)Leclercq’s attitude toward celebrity entourages hasn’t changed. But the fact that there was room for some occasional chitchat in the script allowed for some humor — absent from Leclercq’s features, perhaps because it eats up precious seconds. This is particularly obvious in the scenes between Mehdi and Liana, a rookie criminal who is three decades his junior and as chatty as he is taciturn.“I’m a big fan of the Luc Besson movie ‘Léon: The Professional,’ so we dreamed about a duo like that, with a generational clash, a culture clash,” Leclercq said.It helped that the real-life relationship between Bouajila and Gotoas reflected a similar dynamic, minus bullets.“I’m at the start of my career, he’s been around for 30 years or something,” Gotoas said. “Liana is learning, and I was, too: I’d be checking out how he’d position himself with respect to the camera, how he modulated his performance.”For his next project, Leclercq is stretching once more by leaving behind the shootouts that have served him so well. He is in preproduction on a biopic of the French Formula 1 champion Alain Prost, with a focus on his rivalry with Ayrton Senna in the 1980s and early ’90s.Cars are one of Leclercq’s great passions, he explained. If “Ganglands” is renewed, perhaps he can make room for a few chases. More

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      Mo Abudu Isn’t Waiting for Permission

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      LONDON — Mo Abudu has always understood the power of storytelling, and the impact of its absence. Growing up here as the daughter of Nigerian parents, she found herself being asked mind-boggling questions about the time she spent in Africa, including whether she danced around a fire or lived in a tree.“Never was I ever taught anything about African history,” she said during a recent video call. And, on the television screen at home, a lack of representation of anyone who looked like her also left its mark.“It affected me in such a way that I felt like I didn’t count,” said Abudu, 57, who has since gone on to become the kind of media mogul who can do something about it. “You therefore always felt a need to overcompensate by telling everybody who cared to listen who you were.”Decades later, Abudu is getting the entire world to listen. Her company, EbonyLife Media, has produced some of the biggest TV and box-office successes in Nigeria’s history. The Hollywood Reporter ranked her among the “25 Most Powerful Women in Global Television,” and she was invited this year to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.And last summer, EbonyLife became the first African media company to sign a multi-title film and TV deal with Netflix. The first of those TV titles to debut new episodes in the United States, the Nigerian legal procedural “Castle & Castle,” arrived last week. (Netflix picked it up beginning with Season 2; Season 1 debuted in 2018 on the now-defunct EbonyLife broadcast network.)In separate interviews — one by video last month from her home in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other last summer in person, at a park near her second home, in north London — Abudu talked about the whirlwind of recent years and the challenges of building a media empire. It was all part, she said, of her quest to “sell Africa to the world,” with productions that are high-quality — and locally made.“I think people are tired of storytelling, to a certain extent, from the West because you’re seeing the same stories time and time again — can I just have something new, something fresh?” she said. “And I think the likes of Netflix have understood this.”Born in London, Abudu was sent by her parents to Nigeria at age 7 to live with her grandmother in Ondo, a city about 140 miles northeast of Lagos. Returning to Britain at 11, she said, “I found that I became kind of like an unofficial ambassador.”Growing up, Black faces were next to nonexistent in the onscreen entertainment she had access to. Those she recalled were few, including in the 1980s TV series “Fame,” which led her briefly to dream of being a dancer; and in the landmark 1977 mini-series “Roots,” about the history of American slavery, which she said left her in tears after each episode.At 30, having enjoyed a brief modeling career, she moved back to Nigeria with the goal of seizing professional opportunities she saw opening up in her motherland. Eventually, she worked her way up to becoming the head of human resources for Exxon Mobil, but she couldn’t shake an ambition she had felt since childhood: to tell the modern story of Nigeria to itself, and ultimately to the rest of the globe.With no experience in the industry, she bought an Oprah Winfrey box set, enrolled in a TV-presenting course and drew up a business plan, going on to establish the first Pan-African syndicated daily talk-show, “Moments With Mo.” She soon earned herself the unofficial title of “Africa’s answer to Oprah.”Richard Mofe-Damijo and Ade Laoye in a scene from “Castle & Castle,” which Netflix picked up for Season 2 as part of its overall deal with Abudu. The series made its U.S. debut last week. Kelechi Amadi-Obi/NetflixAlong the way, certain obstacles proved stubborn. Abudu faced discrimination on three fronts, she said: “You face inequality and racism for being Black. You face it for being African. You face it for being a woman. It happens at every point in time.”At every point, she overcame. As Abudu was contemplating her growing role in a changing media landscape, a guest on her chat-show sofa had some particularly inspiring words, she said: Hillary Clinton, who at the time of the interview, in 2009, was the secretary of state.“I said to her, ‘The stereotypical Africa is disease, despair, destitution, deceit — why is that?’” Abudu said, paraphrasing the conversation. “And she said, ‘Mo, more and more voices like yours need to be speaking on behalf of Africa.’”Abudu’s takeaway? “If you don’t take the responsibility to change the narrative, when you leave your storytelling to someone else, then you can’t blame them,” she said.By 2013, “Moments” had made Abudu a household name in Nigeria. Seeing opportunities, Abudu went full Winfrey and started a Pan-African television network: EbonyLife TV. In 2020, Abudu’s umbrella company, EbonyLife Media, abandoned its TV channel to focus on a model based on partnerships with some of the world’s biggest streamers and studios.Today, along with what Abudu described as “over 30 deals” yet to be announced, EbonyLife Media has contracts with Sony Pictures Television, AMC and Westbrook Studios, the production company founded by Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.“I’ve been knocking on these international doors from Day 1,” she said, “but you know, people weren’t ready to listen.”At the start of EbonyLife TV, in 2013, the mission centered on lifestyle programming that showcased the booming, cosmopolitan continent of the 21st century. But Abudu has been gradually flexing her muscles and broadening her creative palette.“Castle & Castle,” which Abudu co-created and executive produces, is about a Lagos law firm run by a husband and wife, whose respective cases threaten to destroy their marriage. With that series, Abudu wanted to focus on legal issues that were specific to Nigeria. In one episode, for example, “there’s a case around lesbianism,” she said. “It’s actually still illegal to be in a homosexual relationship in Nigeria.”Other projects include a TV drama from Sony Pictures Television about the historical all-female West African army known as the Dahomey Warriors; the dystopian series “Nigeria 2099,” set to debut on AMC; the Netflix Original film “Oloture,” released last year, which explores human trafficking and forced prostitution; and the 2022 film “Blood Sisters,” also for Netflix, which depicts drug addiction and domestic abuse across class boundaries in Nigeria.“What unites them,” Ben Amadasun, Netflix’s content director in Africa, said about some of the Netflix titles, “is Mo and her EbonyLife team’s unique ability to portray the realities of the everyday Nigerian and bring a unique perspective to each character.”Among the other productions underway with Netflix is an adaptation of “Death and the King’s Horseman,” the 1975 play by Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize for literature; as well as an adaptation of the Nigerian author Lola Shoneyin’s novel “The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives.”Abudu entered show business in 2006, becoming first a successful talk-show host, with “Moments With Mo,” and later a bona fide media mogul. Her mission, as she put it, is to “sell Africa to the world.”Stephen Tayo for The New York Times“I’m a huge admirer,” Shoneyin said in a video call from her home in Lagos. Shoneyin had turned down several offers of adaptation since “Secret Lives” was published in 2010, she said, but Abudu “really kind of wooed me.”“It was very important to me that the story is told first by an African who I knew would understand the book and the characters almost instinctively,” Shoneyin added. “But also because I wanted the story to be told in the tradition of African storytelling.”Given Abudu’s attitude and ethic, she certainly fit the bill.“Gone are the days whereby you can force-feed me only American content,” Abudu said. “They don’t own all the stories to be told in this world. They’ve had their fair share of telling them.”Abudu has made Nigeria her base and her focus so far, but she is not constricting her horizons. (Already, she employs about 200 staff members across her Lagos organizations, which include the EbonyLife Creative Academy film school and EbonyLife Place, a hotel, cinema and restaurant complex.) She also wants to tell stories from South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and Ethiopia.That could be good news for the rest of the continent. Ultimately, she said, she would like her main contribution to be an “entire ecosystem of storytelling” — generating jobs for everyone from camera operators to costume designers — whose productions can showcase African brands and talent to continents beyond.She hasn’t ruled out a move to the United States. But if she does, it’s just a means to an end — in a field where she has already made great strides.“I will never be lost to my roots,” she said. “It’s not possible, even if I’m living and working and breathing in Hollywood; they cannot have me to a point whereby I’m ever going to forget where I came from.“I think it’s important, because by me making that transition, I am taking a whole bunch of people with me on that journey.” More

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      in Movies

      A Hollywood Producer and a Master of Adaptation

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      Freedom, Maine, population 722, is about as far away from Hollywood as you can get. So when Erin French, who runs the uber-popular Lost Kitchen there, had boldface names flocking to her virtual doorstep looking to buy the film rights to her best-selling memoir, she approached them with a lot of trepidation and a bit of awe.“It was intense,” Ms. French said of the experience of selling her personal story of food, addiction and abuse, told in the 2021 book “Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story; Remaking a Life From Scratch.” “Here you are, sitting in the middle of nowhere, a girl who felt like she had grown up a nobody, and then all of a sudden you’re having Zoom calls with Blake Lively. It was definitely a wild time.”In addition to Ms. Lively, Ms. French and her husband, Michael Dutton, met with others like MGM and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. In the end, Ms. French and Mr. Dutton sold the rights to Bruna Papandrea and her four-year-old company, Made Up Stories. The couple said they were won over by Ms. Papandrea’s passion for the project, her clear vision of how to turn it into a movie and her track record for finding the right talent for projects.“We’re heading into what’s referred to as ‘Shark Territory,’ getting into this whole world of Hollywood-ness,” said Ms. French, “and we felt like Bruna’s a fighter and Bruna was going to always protect us and keep pushing forward.”Erin French, center, sold the rights to her book to Ms. Papandrea, who she felt had a clear vision of how to turn her story into a movie.Stacey Cramp for The New York TimesFor decades, Ms. Papandrea, 50, toiled in the entertainment business shadows of more famous collaborators, most notably Reese Witherspoon. Together, they produced hit adaptations like “Wild,” “Big Little Lies” and “Gone Girl.”With Made Up Stories, though, Ms. Papandrea has stepped firmly into the spotlight. Her latest series, “Nine Perfect Strangers,” which stars Nicole Kidman and Melissa McCarthy and concludes Wednesday, is Hulu’s most-watched original series, according to the streaming service, beating the audience numbers for acclaimed shows like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Act.” Like “Big Little Lies,” it was adapted from a book by Liane Moriarty.The show’s success, according to those involved, is proof of Ms. Papandrea’s tenacity. “She’s hard to say no to,” said Craig Erwich, president of Hulu Originals and ABC EntertainmentShut down in Los Angeles by the pandemic, Ms. Papandrea and her team quickly shifted the entire production to Byron Bay in New South Wales, Australia. Ms. Papandrea persuaded the brand-new Soma meditation retreat to open its doors to the production before opening to the public.“I was like, listen, I made a show called ‘Big Little Lies,’ I’m telling you it just makes your property more, it brings it a lot of attention,” she said with her clipped Australian accent.Sitting outside at a beach cafe in Santa Monica, Calif., last month, Ms. Papandrea spoke with a machine gun cadence, dropping words at the ends of sentences as she toggled between topics. It’s a pace mirroring the frenetic schedule she’s managing as she prepares some seven productions for five streaming platforms — all movies or television shows centered on complicated female protagonists.In the next year alone she will debut one movie and two television shows for Netflix, including the long-gestating adaptation of the best-selling novel “Luckiest Girl Alive”; a series for Spectrum Originals and BET on women’s college basketball; an anthology series for Apple TV+ titled “Roar”; an Amazon original series starring Sigourney Weaver; and a romantic comedy series for Peacock that stars Josh Gad and Isla Fisher.Melissa McCarthy stars in “Nine Perfect Strangers,” a series on Hulu by Made Up Stories.Vince Valitutti/Hulu, via Associated PressIt is a sign of how Ms. Papandrea, known for her penchant for finishing novels in one sitting, is uniquely suited for a moment in the entertainment industry when the number of major companies able to buy content is shrinking but the need for compelling shows that will draw audiences continues to grow.“I’m watching it all curiously because it doesn’t matter what network you run or what streaming platform you head, you have to have curators, you have to have people who have taste,” she said. “The hardest thing in the world is to find something someone wants to make, and that’s my skill.”Ms. Papandrea teamed with Ms. Witherspoon for three years, shepherding projects like “Gone Girl” and “Big Little Lies” to the screen and racking up accolades along the way, including best actress Oscar nominations for both Ms. Witherspoon (“Wild”) and Rosamund Pike (“Gone Girl”). The two went their separate ways in 2017. Ms. Witherspoon formed Hello Sunshine, which was just sold to a new company backed by the investment firm Blackstone Group for $900 million.Ms. Papandrea took the company’s two former employees and with her husband, Steve Hutensky, started Made Up Stories. The company now has 12 employees and offices in Australia and Los Angeles.She attributes the split to the two women wanting different things and having “slightly different tastes.”“Ultimately, she built a big company and I built a big company,” she said with a chuckle.Ms. Witherspoon declined to comment for this article.To finance her new operation, Ms. Papandrea sold a passive minority stake in her business to Endeavor Content, the production arm of the entertainment and sports conglomerate Endeavor. The companies also formed a joint venture — renewable every calendar year — that allows both to serve as co-studios on all Made Up Stories television projects and some Made Up Stories films. The two share the economic risk of their entire TV development slate, but Endeavor does not pay for Ms. Papandrea’s overhead costs. She and Mr. Hutensky maintain independence over all creative decisions.Ms. Papandrea, with Reese Witherspoon, produced hit adaptations like “Big Little Lies,” seen here with some of the cast.Christopher Polk/Getty Images for the Critics’ Choice Awards“I just love being independent. I love it,” she said. “This path has given us the freedom and resources to compete in the marketplace for top material and writers, to bet on up-and-coming creators, to find the right path for each project and to choose the best homes for distribution among the many platforms.”Made Up Stories is one of many companies with a partnership with Endeavor Content.“We are platform agnostic, so we can sell her shows and our shows and other people’s shows to any platform,” said Graham Taylor, a co-president of Endeavor Content. “We’ve kind of built a United Artists 100 years later that we supply shows to every outlet.”The job of a producer has never been easily defined. There are those who take on the title simply because they contributed some money along the way. Others, like Ms. Papandrea, work tirelessly from book option all the way to postproduction and marketing to ensure that the promises they made at the beginning of what is an often long and tortuous process will still be met at the end.“It’s a problem. Producing credits are passed out like lollipops,” said David E. Kelley, the prolific writer and producer, who has worked with Ms. Papandrea on five projects including “Nine Perfect Strangers.” “What we just did in ‘Nine Perfect,’ for example, that’s kind of a miracle. Bruna had to blaze so much trail with the government just to get people into the country in order to shoot. It’s hard work, and it’s a lot of work.”Ms. Papandrea works tirelessly from book option all the way to postproduction and marketing.Phillip Faraone/Getty Images For Stella ArtoisMs. Papandrea, the third of four children, was raised by a single mother in a housing commission flat in the working-class neighborhood of Elizabeth, South Australia. She dropped out of college twice: once after starting a commerce law degree at Melbourne University and later bailing on an arts degree at Adelaide University.She tried her hand at acting. That didn’t stick.She then got a job working as the assistant to the Australian cinematographer Dion Beebe, an opportunity that led her first to being a producer of commercials and then films. Her big break, she said, came when she started working for the directors Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack.The job took her to London and then to Los Angeles, where she learned the art of adaptation from two of the best in the business.According to Ms. Papandrea, Mr. Minghella hired her because she was smart and she made him laugh. He taught her how to treat creative people with respect and to never work with anyone she didn’t want to have a meal with.She held on to those early lessons and has vowed to pay it forward by hiring only young talent with no Hollywood connections.“When we hire people now, we make sure they’ve had no access to the business. We won’t hire someone off a desk,” she said. “We try and find people who have come up with no experience, because how else do you break those people in?”Jessica Knoll was one such author. Ms. Papandrea worked with her to turn her novel “Luckiest Girl Alive” into a feature film. The two first came together seven years ago, just after “Wild” was made. But executive shuffles, changing tastes and other challenges kept the film in development for years. All the while, Ms. Papandrea stuck with Ms. Knoll as the film’s only writer — a feat in modern-day Hollywood.“She was just so fierce in terms of how much she championed writers and how much she protected them and their stories,” said Ms. Knoll, who had never written a screenplay before adapting her own and recalls Ms. Papandrea giving her Mr. Minghella’s memoir “Minghella on Minghella” and coaching her through the process.“I want to be in business with her forever. The room is a brighter room when Bruna Papandrea is in it.” More

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      2021 Emmy Winners: Complete List

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      The list of winners for the 73rd annual Emmy Awards.Streaming services dominated many people’s pandemic lives. Will they dominate at this year’s Emmys, too?The 73rd annual Emmy Awards are happening right now in Los Angeles. The ceremony is primarily in person this year — in contrast to last year’s largely virtual event — and it is being hosted by the comedian Cedric the Entertainer.Netflix’s British royal drama “The Crown” and the Disney+ “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian” have the most nominations, with 24 each. HBO led all networks with 130 nominations. Apple TV+ has a good chance of winning its first major Emmy with “Ted Lasso,” which is the favorite in the comedy category.In the acting categories, Mj Rodriguez (FX’s “Pose”) could make history as the first transgender actor to win a Primetime Emmy in a lead acting category. And Michael K. Williams, who was found dead on Sept. 6, could win the best supporting actor in a drama award posthumously, for his work on the HBO series “Lovecraft Country.”Whatever happens, we will be following along live. See the list of winners, which will be updated throughout the night, below.Writing for a Drama SeriesPeter Morgan, “The Crown” (“War”)Supporting Actor, Limited Series or MovieEvan Peters, “Mare of Easttown”Supporting Actress, Limited Series or a MovieJulianne Nicholson, “Mare of Easttown”Supporting Actor, ComedyBrett Goldstein, “Ted Lasso”Supporting Actress, ComedyHannah Waddingham, “Ted Lasso”Directing for a Variety SpecialBo Burnham, “Inside”Directing for a Variety SeriesDon Roy King, “Saturday Night Live”Guest Actress, ComedyMaya Rudolph, “Saturday Night Live”Guest Actor, ComedyDave Chappelle, “Saturday Night Live”Guest Actress, DramaClaire Foy, “The Crown”Guest Actor, DramaCourtney B. Vance, “Lovecraft Country”Television Movie“Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square” (Netflix) More

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      Julie Delpy’s New Netflix Comedy Gives Voice to Women ‘On the Verge’

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      The talky, slice-of-life series follows four women whom the usual rom-com formula says should have figured it all out by now. Turns out, that’s not real life.Julie Delpy does not mince words when it comes to women and age.“Fifty is not the new 30,” she said during a recent video call from her hotel room in Paris. She was there to promote her television creation, the 12-part series “On the Verge,” which she wrote, oversaw and stars in.“There’s almost a cruel thing about women that if we can’t procreate anymore, what are we?” said Delpy, who also directed several episodes. “And then you become a grandmother and you exist again in your seventies. You have this dead zone.”Produced by Canal Plus and Netflix, “On the Verge,” is a sometimes absurd and yet all-too-real comedy that follows four mostly well-off friends in Los Angeles as they grapple with middle age — only to realize that after all these years, they still have no clue what they’re doing. The idea seems to have found a ready audience: After its debut last week, the series quickly cracked the Netflix Top 10 in the United States, reaching No. 7 by the weekend.So much for dead zones. And not bad for a talky, slice-of-life series that also toggles between English and French.Delpy, 51, has made a career out of creating and portraying worldly female characters in films where most of the action takes place on a walk, on a train or around the dinner table. It hasn’t always been easy getting those characters from page to screen, she said, but it has been especially tough since she started writing about women her age.Per the usual romantic comedy formula, women in their 20s and 30s are often shown screwing up and struggling to figure things out, and it’s supposed to be cute. But by a woman’s 40s or 50s — the part that comes after the happy ending — she is meant to have herself all put together, right?In “On the Verge,” that notion is, literally, a joke.“I loved how all our characters were just beginning to find their confidence when they are about to turn 50,” said Elisabeth Shue, who executive produced and stars in the show. She described filming one particular dinner party scene from Episode 2 that, for Shue, “was a perfect reflection of Julie’s artistic sensibility.”“It was just a lovely mixture of insanity and humor born out of insecurity and chaos,” she added.From left, Alexia Landeau, Elisabeth Shue, Sarah Jones and Delpy in a scene from “On the Verge.” NetflixIn the series, Delpy plays Justine, a successful chef with a bustling restaurant. She is writing a cookbook while working long hours at the restaurant, raising a young son and enduring a barrage of passive aggressive insults from her sulking, out of work husband. Shue plays her friend Anne, a clothing designer with a trust fund, a vaping habit and a husband who is struggling to accept their gender-fluid son.The Tony winner Sarah Jones plays Yasmin, a mother and wife who gave up her career and is desperate now to reclaim something for herself. Alexia Landeau (who co-wrote several episodes and executive produced) plays Ell, a jobless single mother of three children by three different dads.Despite the characters’ struggles, “On the Verge” is very much a comedy, and Delpy isn’t afraid to crack jokes about serious topics like the stresses endured by working mothers, toxic masculinity or ageism. In one early scene, Yasmin is interviewed by a woman half her age and is told that she is, basically, too old. When Yasmin starts to panic and clutches her chest, the young interviewer asks if she is having a heart attack.The scene details an experience that will resonate with many women; Delpy gives the audience permission to laugh, even as they’re cringing.“I’m 46, not 96!” Yasmin shoots back.It’s a comic, cerebral sensibility has been honed throughout Delpy’s career. Her parents, Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, were both actors (they played her onscreen parents in Delpy’s 2007 feature, “Two Days in Paris”), and she grew up in France surrounded by artists, theater actors and writers. Her first big onscreen role came when Jean Luc Godard cast her in his 1985 film “Detective,” when she was 14. She went on to work with Agnieszka Holland on the Golden Globe-winning film “Europa Europa” and with Krzysztof Kieslowski on his “Three Colors” trilogy.She spent much of her childhood backstage at her parents’ experimental theater shows or dancing, making music and writing on her own; later, she studied filmmaking at N.Y.U. It’s that mix of experimentation and structure (Delpy is quick to point out that the show is meticulously scripted) that she brings to “On the Verge.”“It’s sophistication obliterated by absurdity,” said Giovanni Ribisi, who plays Justine’s endearing yet infuriating boss, speaking about Delpy’s sensibility. “Julie has made a mark with her own style. She’s a craftsman. She’s got personality. Like they had in the 1970s.”When Delpy played Céline opposite Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” (1995), her character resonated with a generation of 20-something women in the 1990s — women who were thrilled to see a romantic female lead who could be both philosophical and funny. “Before Sunrise,” shot on a modest budget, proved to audiences and critics alike that a simple tale about two people meeting on a train and talking all night long could go on to become one of the most enduring romantic films of the ’90s.Delpy went on to co-write the sequels, “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight,” with Linklater and Hawke, earning Oscar nominations for best adapted screenplay for both films.She has directed seven films, including the drama “My Zoe,” released earlier this year. With “Verge,” she got to tackle subjects close to her heart, show off her comedy chops and explore the lives of women who, even in their 40s and 50s, deserve more than a few throwaway lines.“It’s fun to be able to talk about real things,” Delpy said. “Although it was a bit of a struggle to get there.”Delpy started thinking in 2013 about the four main characters in “On the Verge,” and a script soon followed. A few people were interested in the project over the years as she shopped it around, but financiers and studios were reluctant to back “a show about women in that age range,” she said.“Fifty is not the new 30,” Delpy said, adding: “The show is talking about not having to lie about your age.”Elliott Verdier for The New York Times“I think it eventually happened, in part, because people are ready,” Delpy said. “It was the right timing, finally.”Olivier Gauriat, an executive producer of the series, signed on in 2019 because he was a fan of Delpy’s work onscreen and off. But he was also drawn to what she was trying to do in “Verge” with regard to female representation and age.“There are not many shows out there revolving around women at this age,” said Gauriat. “Canal Plus and Netflix were very supportive, and I think that’s what was interesting to them. They gave her carte blanche.”Preproduction on “Verge” began prepandemic, before being shutdown with the rest of Hollywood. Delpy went back to the scripts. She adjusted certain story lines to reflect what was actually happening. By the time shooting finally began, she had revised the timeline to take place in January and February of 2020, eight weeks during which a crisis was building but few understood what truly lay ahead. Viewed over a year and a half later, “Verge” feels like a time capsule of those early days just before everyone started stockpiling toilet paper and hunting for N95 masks.Delpy said she had decided to incorporate real world events because the characters were, as it says in the title, on the verge of something new and unknown, and so was the world around them.“Everything is changing for these characters, but everything is changing for the world as well,” she said.Things may be changing, but Delpy harbors no illusions that women over 40 are suddenly the new “it girls.” There’s a moment in “Verge” when Jerry tells Justine, “You’re in a cultural blind spot” — no one cares about women her age.It’s funny because it’s so absurdly insulting. It’s also funny because it rings true.“The show is talking about not having to lie about your age,” she added. “Or pretend you’re something else.” More

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      Netflix and ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ dominate the Creative Arts Emmys.

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      Fueled by “The Queen’s Gambit” and “The Crown,” Netflix dominated the competition at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards over the weekend.Netflix took home 34 Emmys at three separate ceremonies on Saturday and Sunday, while Disney+, the streamer’s closest competitor, won 13 awards. HBO and its streaming service, HBO Max, the perennial Emmys heavyweight, won just 10 awards.Each year, the Television Academy, which organizes the Emmys, announces the winners for dozens of technical awards in the lead-up to the biggest prizes that are announced at the main event, the Primetime Emmy Awards. This year’s prime-time ceremony will take place on Sunday and will be broadcast on CBS.“The Queen’s Gambit,” a limited series about a chess prodigy, won nine Creative Arts Emmys over the weekend, more than any other series. Its closest competitors, with seven awards each, were the Disney+ Star Wars action adventure show “The Mandalorian” and the NBC stalwart “Saturday Night Live.”Although the Creative Arts Emmys are not quite prime-time ready — they include awards like best stunt performance, best hairstyling and outstanding lighting direction for a variety series — they count all the same in the Hollywood record books, and the leaderboard for the 73rd Emmy Awards is now officially underway.The weekend ceremonies also handed out a few key acting awards. “The Queen’s Gambit” took the prize for best cast in a limited series. It beat out a pair of acclaimed HBO series, “I May Destroy You” and “Mare of Easttown.” “The Crown” won for best cast in a drama, and the Apple TV+ show “Ted Lasso” won for best cast in a comedy. Both are favored to take more prizes at the main event.Netflix’s dominance all but guarantees that it will win more Emmys than any other TV network, studio or streaming platform, making 2021 the first year it will beat out its chief rival, HBO, to claim ultimate bragging rights. Three years ago, in a first, Netflix tied HBO for top honors. Going into this year’s Emmys ceremonies, HBO, aided by HBO Max, led all networks with 130 nominations, one more than Netflix.The 73rd Emmy Awards will effectively be a showcase for television achievement during the pandemic. Because of production shutdowns and delays, the number of TV shows in the second half of last year and the first half of this year declined. Submissions for the top categories this year were down 30 percent.The ceremony, hosted by Cedric the Entertainer, will take place indoors and outdoors on the Event Deck at L.A. Live, near the Emmys’ usual home at the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Attendance will be drastically reduced, but in contrast to last year’s remote ceremony, most winners are likely to deliver their acceptance speeches in person. More