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      Can Paramount+ Succeed? One Producer Hopes to Make It So.

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      Like so many other writer-directors, Alex Kurtzman grew up worshiping film.But he is adaptable — and in the streaming era, that is a very lucrative trait.Mr. Kurtzman, the onetime writer of the “Transformers” movies and the director of the 2017 film “The Mummy,” recently renegotiated his deal at CBS Studios into one of the richest there. Under the $160 million, five-and-a-half-year agreement, he will continue to shepherd the growing “Star Trek” television universe for ViacomCBS’s Paramount+ streaming platform.He will also create shows, including a limited series based on “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” which he will direct for Showtime, and the long-awaited adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” That limited series is likely to be sold to an outside streaming service.Mr. Kurtzman’s deal is the latest in a string intended to give prolific producers, like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy for Netflix and Jordan Peele with Amazon Studios, free rein to create content that can feed insatiable consumer appetites and hopefully boost subscriptions for streaming. This one puts the ambitions of CBS Studios — the production arm for the networks and channels under the ViacomCBS umbrella — squarely in the hands of the 47-year-old Mr. Kurtzman.“From the first meeting I had with Alex, it was so obvious to me that he’s our future,” George Cheeks, the president and chief executive of the CBS Entertainment Group, said in an interview. “The guy can develop for broadcast. He can develop for premium streaming, broad streaming. He understands the business. He’s got tremendous empathy. He’s creatively nimble.“When you make these investments,” Mr. Cheeks continued, “you need to know that this talent can actually deliver multiple projects at the same time across multiple platforms.”“Star Trek: Discovery” is one of five “Star Trek” shows that Mr. Kurtzman has produced.Michael Gibson/CBSThe road ahead won’t be easy for ViacomCBS. Its fledgling Paramount+ was a late entry into streaming, and is essentially a rebranded and expanded version of CBS All Access. The company promotes the service’s news and live sports, including National Football League games, along with “a mountain of movies.” (“A Quiet Place 2” debuted on it on July 13.) But Paramount+, in combination with a smaller Showtime streaming offering, had just 36 million subscribers as of May.While it hopes to reach 65 million to 75 million global subscribers by 2024, that’s still a far cry from Netflix’s worldwide total of almost 210 million and the nearly 104 million for Disney+. Even NBCUniversal announced on Thursday that it had 54 million subscribers for its Peacock streaming service, thanks to an Olympic push.And with consolidation mania consuming Hollywood, many analysts are not confident that ViacomCBS will be able to continue to compete with the larger companies on its own.“I think it’s hard to imagine any of these companies going it alone; I think they are all too small,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners. “The challenge, whether it’s Peacock, Paramount+, Disney+ or Hulu, is that all of these companies are still conflicted over what do they put on linear TV, what do they put in a movie theater and what do they put on streaming.“Netflix, Amazon and Apple do not have that debate every day,” he added. “All their assets go into one thing. Here, they have to balance, and that makes all of their streaming services suboptimal.”Those corporate considerations don’t seem to bother Mr. Kurtzman. Rather than bemoaning the diminished state of movies or anguishing over the lack of viable buyers as the market shrinks, he said he was finding the current climate to be creatively invigorating and remarkably fluid.Mr. Kurtzman said he wanted to make the “Star Trek” universe as expansive as the Marvel universe.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“I do believe that the line between movies and television is gone now, and that to me is a tremendous opportunity,” he said in an interview. “For me and for showrunners like me, we can tell stories in a new way. We are not limited by the narrow definition of how you tell a story — something must be told in 10 hours, or something must be told in two hours.”Mr. Kurtzman began working with CBS in 2009 when he developed the reboot of “Hawaii Five-0” with his former writing partner, Roberto Orci. In 2017, he began reimagining the “Star Trek” universe for the company, building on his familiarity with the franchise after co-writing the two J.J. Abrams-directed “Star Trek” movies several years earlier.Since then, he has produced five shows in the universe initially imagined in the 1960s by Gene Roddenberry, and all will be on Paramount+. They are “Star Trek: Discovery”; “Star Trek: Picard”; “Star Trek: Lower Decks”; “Star Trek: Prodigy,” which will debut in the fall; and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” set for release in 2022. ViacomCBS says “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Star Trek: Picard” are among the most watched original series on Paramount+.Also in the works are “Section 31,” starring Michelle Yeoh, and a show built around the “Starfleet Academy,” which will be aimed at a younger audience.But how much “Star Trek” does one planet need?“I think we’re just getting started,” Mr. Kurtzman said. “There’s just so much more to be had.”He recently finished a four-month shoot in London for the first half of “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” a 10-episode series based on the 1976 David Bowie film. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a new alien character who arrives on Earth at a turning point in human evolution.Mr. Kurtzman said he loved the experience of working on the series, buoyed by the fact that the pandemic allowed him and his writing partner, Jenny Lumet, the opportunity to complete all the episodes before production began.“I would absolutely not be doing anything differently if we were making this as a film,” he said. “I’m working with movie stars in three different countries, shooting sequences that are certainly not typical television sequences, all of which I can only do because of my experience working in films.”Ms. Lumet met Mr. Kurtzman in 2015. He requested getting together after seeing the film “Rachel Getting Married,” which she wrote. Ms. Lumet said she was surprised that this “sci-fi robot guy in khakis” was interested in meeting her at all.“All he wanted to do was talk about tiny moments, tiny real moments in movies and tiny moments in television shows, and he was so gentle and willing to listen,” she said. “Usually, the robot guys aren’t willing to listen to anything, and that’s all he wanted to do. It was really cool.”The two have worked on everything from “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” to the short-lived “Clarice” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” Next, they plan to tackle the story of Ms. Lumet’s grandmother Lena Horne in a limited series for Showtime.Those around Mr. Kurtzman credit his early experience in television (“Alias,” “Fringe,” “Sleepy Hollow”) for giving him the ability to manage multiple projects at one time without appearing to be overwhelmed. “He has an almost supernatural ability to keep separate train tracks in his head, this show, this show and this show, and he can jump from one to the other,” Ms. Lumet said. “He is one of the few people who can keep all the trains running.”His work as a film screenwriter began on Michael Bay’s 2005 film, “The Island.” Soon, he and Mr. Orci were being called “Hollywood’s secret weapons” for their ability to crack scripts on lucrative existing properties that others couldn’t (like “Transformers”). That led him to consider “Star Trek” in the same expansive terms that Marvel Studios views its cinematic universe. It’s a strategy that CBS Studios thoroughly endorses.Mr. Kurtzman wrote two “Star Trek” films with Roberto Orci, right. J.J. Abrams, middle, directed both.Zade Rosenthal/Paramount PicturesDavid Stapf, president of CBS Studios, points to “Star Trek: Prodigy” as an example. The animated show, one of the first animated “Star Trek” shows geared at children, is set to debut in the fall on Paramount+ before moving to Nickelodeon.“It obviously builds fans at a much younger generation, which helps with consumer products,” Mr. Stapf said. “But it’s also a smart way to look at building an entire universe.”To Mr. Stapf, who has overseen CBS Studios since 2004, the “Marvelization” of “Star Trek” can mean many things.“Anything goes, as long as it can fit into the ‘Star Trek’ ethos of inspiration, optimism and the general idea that humankind is good,” he said. “So comedy, adult animation, kids’ animation — you name the genre, and there’s probably a ‘Star Trek’ version of it.”That’s good news to Mr. Kurtzman, who wants to get much weirder with the franchise, which will celebrate its 55th birthday this year. He points to a pitch from Graham Wagner (“Portlandia,” “Silicon Valley”), centered on the character Worf, that he calls “incredibly funny, poignant and touching.”“If it were up to me only, I would be pushing the boundaries much further than I think most people would want,” he said. “I think we might get there. Marvel has actually proven that you can. But you have to build a certain foundation in order to get there and we’re still building our foundation.” More

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      From ‘Call My Agent!’ to Hollywood Career

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      The French series was a pandemic hit in the United States. And now its star, Camille Cottin, is emerging to find herself in demand.At some point during the pandemic, perhaps between the debut of “Ted Lasso” last August and “Bridgerton” in December, you may have happened upon Netflix’s French import “Call My Agent!” (“Dix Pour Cent” in French), a sweet yet absurd sendup of the global entertainment complex as seen through the lens of a Parisian talent agency where the agents are mostly good-hearted lovers of cinema at the beck and call of their highly demanding clients.If so, you were one of millions who discovered Camille Cottin, the French actress who played Andrea Martel, the hard-nosed striver with the piercing green eyes who is trying to keep her agency afloat while her personal life falls apart.The show was one of the few joys of the pandemic, one that prompted viewers to sample additional international content like “Lupin” and “Money Heist,” overcoming “the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles” that the “Parasite” director, Bong Joon Ho, referred to during his 2020 Golden Globes speech. The success of “Call My Agent!” has prompted spinoffs in Britain, Quebec and Turkey. And there is now talk of a stand-alone movie that will see Andrea Martel headed to New York.But Cottin, 42, whose background includes theater and sketch comedy, completely missed the phenomenon that “Call My Agent!” became in the United States while she was in lockdown in Paris with her husband and two young children. Turns out, she was just as miserable as the rest of us.“I was quite worried in the pandemic and I was a bit paralyzed,” Cottin said in English during a recent video call. “I wanted to be creative, but I wasn’t at all. Also I had the feeling like I’m never going to work again. I was scared.”“Now you tell me during the pandemic everybody watched ‘Call My Agent!’ I was miles away, imagining that I was buried alive,” she added with a grim laugh.Cottin as a talent rep in Paris in “Call My Agent!” with Grégory Montel, left, and Assad Bouab.Christophe Brachet/NetflixCottin was conducting this interview in a car on her way home from a costume fitting for the Cannes Film Festival. (No “Call My Agent!” fans, the fitting did not involve a fussy feathered gown like the one Juliette Binoche awkwardly donned at the end of Season 2.) Cottin’s new film “Stillwater,” in which she plays Virginie, a working actress and single mother who guides Matt Damon’s remorseful father through an ill-conceived journey in Marseilles, has just debuted to mostly positive reviews. Manohla Dargis called her “electric” in The New York Times. Vanity Fair called her performance “bright and winsome.”But this moment in the car was far less glamorous. Her 6-year-old daughter was fast asleep, head in mom’s lap. And when the car stopped, I could see the multitasking Cottin at work, scooping up her groggy child, a poof of pink taffeta in one arm, her video call still on in the other, a bright Parisian sky in the background. She paused for a moment to put her daughter to bed before continuing the conversation on the floor of her bathroom, a compromise she made with her child, who asked her not to stray too far. Then her husband, Benjamin, came home. “The father is here!” she exclaimed. “Virginie would have had to handle that situation alone.”After a small role in the 2016 “Allied,” starring Brad Pitt, “Stillwater” represents Cottin’s biggest introduction yet to American audiences. It just may be the role that lets her officially cross over from obscure French actress to global sensation. Later this year she will star opposite Lady Gaga and Adam Driver in Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci,” playing Paola Franchi, the girlfriend of Maurizio Gucci (Driver). And she’s set to reprise her role as Hélène, a high-ranking member of the assassin organization the Twelve, in BBC’s “Killing Eve.”The international community awakened to Cottin’s charms far before all of us in the United States were stuck at home. When “Call My Agent!” showed up on British television, Cottin discovered the show had found an audience across the English Channel. It was 2019, and she was attending a casting director festival in Kilkenny, Ireland, with her own French agent. Suddenly she was the center of attention.“They were like, ‘Oh could I make a selfie with you?,’ and I was like, ‘What? You’re the James Bond casting director,’” she said, laughing.That trip and another to London led to her casting in “Gucci” and to her meeting the producer of “Killing Eve.”Cottin said she was much less assured than her agent character: “If I have to make a choice, it will take me too long, always too long. And I will ask everybody his opinion about it.”Tania Franco Klein for The New York TimesYet “Call My Agent!” had no bearing on the “Stillwater” director Tom McCarthy’s decision to cast Cottin. He hadn’t yet seen the show when he met her. Rather, he hired her based on an audition that he said astonished him and his co-writers, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré.“You kind of can’t keep your eyes off her when she is on the screen,” he said in a recent interview from France. “She’s a bit scattered, a bit all over the place. She’s funny, she’s self-deprecating, she’s empathetic. She’s tough. She’s straightforward. And I feel like after watching her for a year and a half in the edit room, every moment with her is very lived.”To Cottin, Virginie, who is open and nurturing and always looking for something to fix (like Damon’s Oklahoman roughneck), is a near facsimile of herself.“Virginie is the closest character I’ve had to play to me,” she said even though it’s one of the few roles she’s played in English. “We have the same energy. And until now, I’ve mostly been counted for women with a lot of more tension. A bit more in control.”There is a disarming ease to Cottin that is evident on initial introduction and belies the icy veneer of her “Call My Agent!” character. She doesn’t take herself too seriously — McCarthy calls her “goofy” — and you realize quickly how great her potential for comedy is. It’s a skill she exhibited in her most well-known French role, playing the lead in the prank TV show “Connasse,” which means “bitch” in her native tongue. Her exploits included scaling Kensington Palace in search of an introduction to Prince Harry.Cottin with Matt Damon and Lilou Siauvaud in “Stillwater.” She won the role on the strength of her audition. The director hadn’t seen “Call My Agent!”Jessica Forde/Focus FeaturesA “Call My Agent!” producer, Dominique Besnehard, described Cottin as “the pretty, biting, bold one” who in the role of Andrea “is very good at going from harshness to fragility.”To Cottin, it’s a character she both admires and understands, yet still finds at a remove from her own personality.“I have much less assurance than Andrea. She is more self-confident and strategic and good at making decisions,” she said. “If I have to make a choice, it will take me too long, always too long. And I will ask everybody his opinion about it.”Cottin is decidedly not uncertain about her career, but as an actress in her 40s she is more aware that the highs she’s experiencing today may not predict the highs she will see in her future.“Maybe if I was 20, I would think, ‘Oh my God, maybe I’m going to have an Oscar,’” she said, laughing, in a mocking American accent. “It’s never vertical. You can make a step, you can consider that you’ve been up and then suddenly, you can go down. Nothing is a straight line. I see these projects as trips, great trips. I can’t say, ‘Oh, now that I’ve done that I can tell you what’s coming next,’ because I don’t know. And it doesn’t mean that it will happen again.”Besnehard suggested she could have a career like Binoche, taking roles both in France and the United States. “I hope the American people would not monopolize her,” he said.McCarthy sees a much clearer trajectory.“I predict great things for Cami and not just because of our movie, which I think she’s sensational in but it’s just her time,” he said. “You can feel it when someone’s earned a moment in their career, and put in the work, and they’re ready to take control of it.” More

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      In ‘Mr. Corman,’ Joseph Gordon-Levitt Looks Inward and Asks, ‘What If?’

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      For his new Apple TV+ comedy series, Gordon-Levitt imagined what his life might have been like if he hadn’t been so lucky. “It’s probably the most me-ish thing I’ve ever made.”Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the first to admit he’s had it pretty good. He has had a wildly successful acting career on stages and screens spanning over three decades. He sings, dances, writes and directs, and he does a decent Nirvana cover. He has a wife and two kids and he hardly seems to age. More

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      Ron Popeil, Inventor and Ubiquitous Infomercial Pitchman, Dies at 86

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      Mr. Popeil became a well-known presence on TV, hawking products that people didn’t know they needed, including the Veg-O-Matic and the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler.Ron Popeil, a made-for-TV inventor and salesman whose infomercial stardom persuaded millions of Americans to buy the Veg-O-Matic, Pocket Fisherman and dozens of other products they had no idea they needed, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 86.The cause was a brain hemorrhage, his sister Lisa Popeil said.Mr. Popeil’s mastery of television marketing, dating to the 1950s but spanning several decades, made him nearly as recognizable onscreen as the TV and movie stars of his era. Several of his catchphrases — especially “But wait! There’s more” and “set it and forget it” — have endured beyond his retirement.And many American homes still have, or once had, the products he hawked, some schlocky gizmos that were quickly discarded and others long-running fixtures: the Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator, Popeil’s Pasta & Sausage Maker, Mr. Microphone, the Bagel Cutter and the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler, among them.The products chopped, charred, shined, sharpened, cleaned, massaged, folded a fishing rod into a pocket and covered bald spots with a spray can. He sold them all without shouting, a folksy, calming presence that made half-hour infomercials their own form of entertainment as he demonstrated the product and set up testimonials from the audience.“Ron literally invented the business of direct-response TV sales,” Steve Bryant, a one-time QVC host, said in 1994. “Ron paints in very definable brushstrokes, and every doubt in the customer’s mind is wiped away.”Mr. Popeil (pronounced poh-PEEL) was born in New York on May 3, 1935. His parents divorced when he was young and he lived with grandparents in Chicago. He said he missed out on having a true childhood; “I never had a birthday party,” he once said.His father, Samuel Popeil, was the inventor of the Chop-O-Matic and several other well-known items, and as a teenager Ron began selling his father’s inventions at a Walgreen’s store in Chicago.He described his relationship with his father, who died in 1984, as all business. In 1974, Samuel’s second wife, Eloise, was convicted of attempting to hire two men to murder him. After serving 19 months of her sentence, the couple later remarried.After getting his start selling his father’s products, Mr. Popeil created his own company, Ronco, which he sold in 2005 for about $56 million. The company’s sales dropped 35 percent in the year that followed, and the company went bankrupt within two years before being revived in 2008.“The Popeil-Ronco story goes back to the old pitch traditions of when somebody used to stand up at a county fair or on a boardwalk and, through nuances of word, voice, gestures, could get somebody to stop in their tracks and buy something they would never consider buying,” Tim Samuelson, author of “But Wait! There’s More!,” a book about the Popeil family, said in 2008.After the company’s creditors forced it to be liquidated in 1984, Mr. Popeil bought its trademarks and inventory back for about $2 million. A few years later, he spent $33,000 to make a one-hour infomercial for a food dehydrator, and nearly $60 million over the years to broadcast it on local stations and cable channels. It resulted in more than $90 million in sales, he said.His ubiquitous placement on stations across the country helped make him a household figure. His gadgets were lampooned by Dan Aykroyd on “Saturday Night Live” and in a Weird Al Yankovic song called “Mr. Popeil.”“I’ve gone by many titles: King of Hair, King of Pasta, King of Dehydration, or to use a more colloquial phrase, a pitchman or a hawker,” Mr. Popeil said in 1995. “I don’t like those phrases, but I am what I am. Pick a product, any product on your desk. Introduce the product. Tell all the problems relating to the product. Tell how the product solves all those problems. Tell the customer where he or she can buy it and how much it costs. Do this in one minute. Try it. You know what it sounds like? It comes out like this: Brrrrrrrrrrr.”In addition to his sister Lisa, Mr. Popeil is survived by his wife, Robin; daughters Kathryn Gantman, Lauren Popeil, Contessa Popeil and Valentina Popeil; another sister, Pamela Popeil; and four grandchildren. Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Arthur’ Is Ending After 25 Years

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      The world’s most popular student aardvark is retiring, at least from the big-hearted series that bears his name. PBS said there may be “additional Arthur content” in the future.These wonderful kind of days in a neighborhood where aardvarks, rabbits and other animals go to school, learn about life and play are ending. More

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      City Plans Central Park Concert for the Vaccinated: LL Cool J, Santana and More

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      LL Cool J, Elvis Costello, Andrea Bocelli, Carlos Santana and the New York Philharmonic will join Bruce Springsteen in performances Aug. 21 on the Great Lawn.LL Cool J, Elvis Costello, Andrea Bocelli, Carlos Santana and the New York Philharmonic will join Bruce Springsteen and other artists next month at the starry Central Park concert that the city is planning to herald its comeback from the pandemic, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday.The mayor said that concertgoers would need to show proof of vaccination.Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York announced that next month there will be a concert in Central Park to celebrate the city’s recovery from the coronavirus, with performances from LL Cool J, Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen.“We want this to be a concert for the people,” Mr. de Blasio said at a video news conference, announcing more of the headliners — and the name — of the event, “We Love NYC: The Homecoming Concert,” which will be held on the Great Lawn on Aug. 21. “But I also want to be clear: It has to be a safe concert. It has to be a concert that helps us keep moving forward our recovery.”“So, if you want to go to this concert, you need to show proof of vaccination,” he added.The lineup features artists and musical icons from a number of eras, genres and styles, including the Killers; Earth, Wind & Fire; Wyclef Jean; Barry Manilow, and the previously announced performers, including Paul Simon, Jennifer Hudson and Patti Smith.While 80 percent of the tickets will be free, proof of vaccination will be required to attend. (Reasonable accommodation would be provided for those unable to get vaccinated because of a disability, the city said in a news release.) Masks will be optional, given the vaccination requirement and the fact that it is being held outdoors.Free tickets will be released to the public in batches at nyc.gov/HomecomingWeek beginning Monday at 10 a.m. Others will be available for purchase Monday.Gates will open for the concert, which is being produced in partnership with Live Nation, at 3 p.m. on Aug. 21, and the show will start at 5 p.m. CNN will also air the event live worldwide, including on CNN en Español.The venerable music producer Clive Davis, a Brooklyn native, has been working on the concert since May. He has lived almost his whole life in New York, he said at the news conference, but has never witnessed anything like the events of the past year and a half.“As a born, bred and true New Yorker, I well know how resilient we are, and how New York always comes back,” Mr. Davis said. “And yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are coming back. And I cannot think, really, of a more appropriate way to celebrate this than an unforgettable concert in the most special venue in the world: the Great Lawn at Central Park.” More