It’s Friday, and we’re wishing Saturday Night Live was still in season so we could see its version of the Sarah Huckabee Sanders goodbye party. Long live Aidy Bryant!
Greetings from Los Angeles, where we are finally understanding Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi; contemplating the reboot of Daria with Tracee Ellis Ross; digging deep into Kenan Thompson’s 17-year run on SNL and cheering the latest Toy Story movie. (Pixar apparently did the impossible and made the fourth iteration in a 24-year-old franchise poignant and funny.)
You Say Quibi, I Say Quibi
Between the Produced By Conference in Los Angeles last Saturday and the Banff World Media Festival this past Sunday, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman have been on a media blitz of sorts, touting their new mobile-content platform, Quibi (short for quick bites), to any and all who would listen.
“I think people are charged up about the challenge and the opportunity of a new form of storytelling,” Katzenberg told me this week. “The fact that we’re creating the next generation of storytelling, which is long-form stories told in chapters, is really marrying together these two tried, tested, well-proven forms of film narrative (film and television) with a different architecture and structure.”
Launched in 2018 and set to debut in April 2020, Quibi has built an impressive roster of talent (Steven Spielberg, Paul Feig, Antoine Fuqua are just some of the names jumping into the space) eager to create new content for the platform, partly because of the creative opportunity it offers and also because of the financial rewards it promises. Creators will be making two-to-four-hour pieces of content that will be divided into 7-to-10-minute chunks meant for viewing on mobile phones. After two years of airing on the Quibi service, the IP will revert back to the creator, who can edit it into one contiguous film and sell the rights globally.
Fuqua, who is currently filming the first Quibi serial #Freerayshawn in New Orleans with star Stephan James (If Beale Street Could Talk), told me about the allure: “Someone is basically financing a film or a TV show for you on a new platform and then for the film itself, you get to own the IP. I can’t think of a better situation.”
We spent some time with the consummate entrepreneurs this week to better understand how Quibi works and why so many talented creatives are jumping into this business with them.
Katzenberg’s infectious demeanor has a lot to do with it.
“Jeffrey has always been a leader and an innovator, someone who is always pushing for what’s next,” added Fuqua. “I think our business needs that, constantly pushing to try to bring entertainment to people in different ways. The art form deserves it and the audience deserves it.”
For more on Quibi, click here for my full report.
Jodie Landon’s Moment
“It was the perfect mash-up of all of the things that I want represented in the world,” Tracee Ellis Ross said to my colleague Joy Press about the animated MTV reboot of Daria that she will voice and executive produce. This time around though, rather than center on the “wise and wisecracking” Daria (who was originally created as a spin-off to Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead), the show will give center stage to the titular character’s friend Jodie Landon, an African-American teenager who navigated her predominantly white school with grace and wit.
Writes Press, “While Daria had the privilege of rebelling and withdrawing, Jodie felt compelled to excel. At the end of the original series, she decided to attend a historically black college instead of an Ivy League university, telling her parents she ‘wanted to stop being the black kid and just be a kid.’”
“Jodie was woke before woke was a thing!” Ross noted in Press’s piece—making her a conscious, complicated role model on an animated show full of “that off-kilter, witty, smart-girl sense of humor.”
For Press’s full piece on Jodie and Daria, click here.
Kenan’s World
Kenan Thompson is Saturday Night Live’s longest-running cast member in the show’s 44-year history. For 17 years, the 41-year-old former kid actor has been cracking up audiences—and fellow castmates—with his joyous portrayals of game show hosts, weird uncles, and Al Sharpton. My colleague K. Austin Collins spent some time with Thompson deep into his SNL tenure. (The comedian declined to comment on his future plans, but his fall dance card is full with three different projects.)
Mostly though he wants to talk about his years as SNL’s most valuable utility player, the guy often in awe of his castmates (Will Ferrell was a particular favorites) who often, because of the lack of diversity on the set, was charged with playing many different characters.
SNL writer Brian Tucker tells Austin, “Early on, he was one of only a few black cast members. So he was asked to do a lot of different things. Whereas if you have five or six different white guys, you can kind of pick and choose whose voice fits where. He had to be versatile just because there were lots of types of roles that only he could do.”
For more on Collins’s profile of Thompson, click here.
Here’s to Number Four!
Phew! Toy Story 4 isn’t the money grab we all thought it would be when Pixar announced it in 2014, four years after bringing the highly successful and poignant meditation on childhood and parenthood to a close with 2010’s Toy Story 3. Rather, writes our critic Richard Lawson, the film, which centers on a quest to reunite Bonnie (the new child) with her favorite new toy, “not only delivers plenty of gonzo-funny moments and genuine thrills, but also interrogates and complicates the series’s core themes.”
Adds Lawson, “Toy Story 4 is sort of about retirement, and sort of about being an empty nester. But it’s also, less age-specifically, about exploring possibilities beyond a life of nurturing, peering past domestic bounds and seeing what else might be out there. There’s a warming sigh of understanding in the movie. Though it’s said several times that providing support is the most noble thing a toy (and thus, in this world’s arithmetic, also a person?) can do, Toy Story 4 also acknowledges that there are other options, other fulfillment and purpose to be realized.”
Clearly none of us expected this much nuance from the fourth chapter of a nearly 25-year-old franchise. For Lawson’s full review, click here.
And that’s it for the week in Hollywood! Tell me what else you’re seeing out there, and let me know what you want to read. Send tips, comments, and what show you miss most during the summer hiatus to Nicole_Sperling@condenast.com. Follow me on Twitter @nicsperling. If you received this email from a friend and would like to subscribe to the newsletter, head on over here.
