Satter, Michelle

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    Young Filmmaker Lives His ‘Fairy Tale’ at Sundance

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    “I feel like I’m in a fairy tale,” Sean Wang said to the sold-out crowd gathered at the Ray Theater in Park City, Utah, last month for his Sundance Film Festival debut.Mr. Wang, a 29-year-old filmmaker, was dressed in a black suit and white Vans (a nod to his skateboarding roots). He grabbed his chest in a show of how fast his heart was beating as he introduced his film, “Didi.” It is a coming-of-age story about an angsty, insecure 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy trying to find his place in the world.“I’m just going to take a few seconds to take this all in,” he said before snapping a photograph of the audience. The warm crowd included Mr. Wang’s family and friends, the film’s cast and crew, and a handful of potential buyers who have the power to transform his station in life from aspiring filmmaker to bona fide Hollywood director.It has happened before. Luminaries like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Damien Chazelle, Ava DuVernay and Lulu Wang all went from hopeful dreamers to actual filmmakers in part thanks to the Sundance Film Festival, which just concluded its 40th year.Mr. Wang made a series of short films while working on and off for Google Creative Labs.Mr. Wang has mined aspects of his childhood in much of his work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mel Brooks and Angela Bassett Feted at the Governors Awards

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      The academy honored Mel Brooks, Angela Bassett, the recently widowed editor Carol Littleton and Sundance’s Michelle Satter, whose son died in a shooting.Despite the chockablock ballroom full of Hollywood’s best and brightest, a jovial emcee in the comedian John Mulaney and honorees the audience seemed thrilled to celebrate, a pall of sadness was cast over the Governors Awards — an event created 14 years ago by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to shorten the Oscar telecast by relegating the honorary Oscars to its own untelevised confab.Held Tuesday night, the ceremony — which was delayed two months because of the Hollywood strikes — honored two women who had just experienced remarkable losses. The editor Carol Littleton’s husband of 51 years, the cinematographer and former academy president John Bailey, died in mid-November. Just two weeks later, Michelle Satter, the Sundance Institute’s founding director and the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, learned that her son, Michael Latt, 33, had been shot dead at his home in Los Angeles.“We need to talk through a broken heart,” the filmmaker Ryan Coogler said during his presentation to Satter, who had guided him through the making of his first feature, “Fruitvale Station.”Still, as they say, the show must go on. And with Oscar nomination voting set to begin Thursday, A-listers of all stripes were in full campaign mode, working valiantly to try to ensure their spot on the ballot when nominations are announced on Jan. 23.Boldfaced names mingling in the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood included Christopher Nolan, Margot Robbie, Robert Downey Jr., Greta Gerwig, Leonardo DiCaprio, Colman Domingo, Ava DuVernay, Florence Pugh and scores of others.The first award of the night went to 97-year-old Mel Brooks, who the presenter Matthew Broderick said was older than penicillin, FM radio, polyester and the academy itself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Angela Bassett and Mel Brooks Are Among Those to Receive Honorary Oscars

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      The Sundance Institute executive Michelle Satter and the film editor Carol Littleton will also get prizes at the Governors Awards ceremony in November.Just a few months after Angela Bassett came close to clinching a supporting-actress Oscar for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” she’ll become one of four Hollywood figures to receive an honorary Oscar at this year’s Governors Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced. Also getting honorary Oscars will be the director Mel Brooks and the editor Carol Littleton, while the Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satter will be presented with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.The awards “honor four trailblazers who have transformed the film industry and inspired generations of filmmakers and movie fans,” the academy president Janet Yang said in a statement.Bassett, 64, was first nominated for playing Tina Turner in the biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” and also starred in films like “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” “Malcolm X” and “Boyz N the Hood.” Her awards-season run for Wakanda Forever” earlier this year netted her a Golden Globe, and though she lost the Oscar to “Everything Everywhere All at Once” supporting actress Jamie Lee Curtis, Bassett is still one of only four Black actresses to have received more than one Oscar nomination for acting.Mel Brooks previously won for “The Producers” screenplay.Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated PressBrooks, who turns 97 this week, is the rare recipient of this honorary award to have already won a competitive Oscar: In 1969, he triumphed in the original-screenplay category for his debut film, “The Producers.” Much more was still to come, as Brooks went on to become one of Hollywood’s most notable comic directors, making beloved films like “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles.” He’s even one of 18 people in show business to have reached competitive EGOT status, after having added Grammys, Emmys, and Tonys to the Oscar on his awards shelf.Satter, the founding senior director of the Sundance Institute’s artist programs, has spent four decades nurturing independent filmmakers at the earliest stages of their careers: Projects like Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream,” Miranda July’s “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station” were all developed at Satter’s Sundance Labs.Littleton was Oscar-nominated for editing Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and went on to work primarily with the directors Lawrence Kasdan (on films like “The Big Chill” and “The Accidental Tourist”) and Jonathan Demme (on “Beloved” and his remakes “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Truth About Charlie”).Though these honorary prizes are not televised, they remain one of awards season’s most star-studded events: Scheduled this year for Nov. 18, they offer the chance not only to herald the deserving but also to get schmoozy face time with a packed ballroom of Oscar voters. Expect emotional speeches delivered to scads of this season’s hopeful nominees, all of whom will work the crowd at every intermission. More