Will Smith talks with Trevor Noah about his mistakes on a “horrific” Oscar night; Everything Everywhere All at Once wins big at the Gotham Awards; Welcome to Chippendales is the latest project to revisit the sad story of Dorothy Stratten.
Chippendales: Is everyone watching Welcome to Chippendales, Hulu’s slick look at 80s glamour and eventually murder, starring Kumail Nanjiani? It’s quite entertaining, but also makes things up — and especially distorts the story of Playboy star Dorothy Stratten and her husband, Paul Snider. Here’s my breakdown of how it crunches and distorts the timeline for the sake of drama. Long story short: The show’s first episode connects several people who were barely connected in real life (namely Stratten and Snider, and choreographer Nick De Noia) for the sake of a devastating, painful kicker.
Gotham Awards: Everything Everywhere All at Once won best feature at the 2022 Gotham Awards, held in New York City, where Ke Huy Quan also won best supporting performance for his role in the film. Till‘s Danielle Deadwyler won the award for best lead performance, and director Chinonye Chukwu accepted on her behalf. The Gotham Awards also paid tribute to Adam Sandler, Michelle Williams, the cast of Fire Island, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Audible founder Don Katz, Focus executives Peter Kujawski and Jason Cassidy, and the late Sidney Poitier. Everything Everywhere All at Once also leads in nominations at the Spirit Awards, which will be held March 4, 2023.
‘I Lost It’: Will Smith spoke to Trevor Noah on The Daily Show about his Oscar night slap of Chris Rock. “That was a horrific night, as you can imagine,” said Smith, whose new film Emancipation is out next month. “There’s many nuances and complexities to it. But at the end of the day, I just — I lost it, you know?” Smith continued. “I was going through something that night, you know? Not that that justifies my behavior at all… It was a lot of things. It was the little boy that watched his father beat up his mother, you know? All of that just bubbled up in that moment. That is not who I want to be.” You can watch the whole thing here if you like:
Scarjo TV: In her first TV series role, Scarlett Johansson will star in and executive produce Just Cause, a legal thriller based on John Katzenbach’s 1992 novel, Deadline exclusively reports. The book has a male protagonist, Miami newspaper editorial writer Matt Cowart, but will swap genders to become Madison “Madi” Cowart, a reporter for a newspaper sent to cover the final days of a death row inmate. There’s a full circle thing happening here: At age 10, she appeared in a 1995 feature adaptation of Katzenbach’s book, in her second film role. She played Katie, the daughter of Harvard law professor Paul Armstrong, played by Sean Connery.
More Dorothy Stratten: The Playboy Playmate – who first suggested that Chippendales dancers should wear cuffs and collars like those of Playboy bunnies — has been the subject of several films and documentaries, including the 1981 TV movie Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story, which starred Jamie Lee Curtis as Stratten and Bruce Weitz as Snider, and the 1983 Bob Fosse film Star 80, in which Mariel Hemingway played Stratten and Eric Roberts portrayed Snider. At the time of her death, she was trying to end her marriage to Snider, a suitcase pimp, to be with her new love, director Peter Bogdanovich, who directed her well-regarded performance in They All Laughed. (I’m on a bit of a Roberts kick lately, having recently watched The Pope of Greenwich Village and Runaway Train back to back, and the guy is unbelievably watchable, especially in the scuzzo roles he does so well. But I’ve always avoided Star 80, which looks too sad. Is it time?) Anyway, here’s the (very) 1981 film They All Laughed, which is dedicated to Stratten:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ2U_8pG4r0
Main image: Nicola Peltz Beckham as Dorothy Stratten and Dan Stevens as Paul Snider in Welcome to Chippendales.
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