Deadline Launches Contenders Television: Documentary + Unscripted Streaming Site

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures wraps up its 10-day major retrospective of filmmaker Lourdes Portillo’s work later today, with a screening of her 2001 documentary Missing Young Woman (Señorita Extraviada). 

Mediawan has been shaking the foundations of the film and TV world in France and Europe since it was launched in 2015 by producer Pierre-Antoine Capton, billionaire entrepreneur Xavier Niel and financier Matthieu Pigasse.

William Earl Studio71, a digital content firm that works with social media creators, is set to launch two video game-oriented free streaming channels on Amazon’s Freevee platform. The Gameplay Networks outlets will largely revolve around the company’s gaming-focused creators with an emphasis on mega-popular platforms such as Minecraft and Roblox gameplay, reviews and tutorials. “Today, gaming content represents one of the top entertainment verticals, and we are proud to launch on Amazon Freevee,” said Adam Boorstin, co-CEO of Studio71. “We work with some of the top gamers in the world, and we look forward to bringing their content to connected TVs alongside legacy entertainment brands on Amazon Freevee.”

EXCLUSIVE: Brussels-based company Best Friend Forever has acquired international rights for zany Kung-Fu-themed action romantic comedy Zenithal.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Cinetic Media is launching sales in Cannes on “Anita,” a documentary about actor-model Anita Pallenberg, which premieres in the Cannes Classics section. In “Anita,” which includes never-seen-before Super 8mm home movies and family photographs, Pallenberg’s words from her unpublished memoir are voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The first-look photo (above) shows Pallenberg and Keith Richards in 1967 in Cannes, where Volker Schlöndorff’s “Degree of Murder,” in which she starred, premiered in competition. Her other screen credits included “Performance,” alongside Mick Jagger, and “Barbarella.”

The Writers Guild of America has established a site on its Strike Hub where members can and must report strike breakers. Those who fail to report suspected “scabs” can face discipline themselves. After the last writers’ strike – a 100-day walkout in 2007-08 – a dozen members were brought up on trial for strike breaking, three of whom were found guilty. The current strike is now in its eleventh day.

Deadline has launched the streaming site for Sound & Screen: Television, it’s live-music showcase featuring the musicians and their scores behind this year’s buzziest small-screen series and movies.

Boomy, a program that uses AI to generate entire songs, announced on May 1 that Spotify had launched a crackdown on tracks created using its technology that had been uploaded to the platform. In a statement to Music Business Worldwide published two days later, a representative for Spotify said that the company had detected illegitimate streams on a number of Boomy-generated songs and taken down the offenders.

Since Deadline formed 14 years ago, we’ve never lost sight of the human struggles felt by writers and everyone else during labor standoffs. Today, we proudly launch Strike Talk with Billy Ray and Todd Garner, a weekly podcast dedicated to dissecting the issues that caused talks to break off between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, this week prompting the writers to trade their pencils for picket signs. A reckoning is upon us, as writers try to keep their place at a moment when studios and streamers struggle to impose economic efficiencies to show fiscal responsibility to their shareholders, and writers struggle with things like streaming deals that have no chance for backend compensation in success, and series that have far fewer than the 22 episodes that had been the norm on the traditional networks.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Monte-Carlo Television Festival has revealed the nominees for its Golden Nymph Awards. The festival will open June 16 with the world premiere of the first episode of “Harlan Coben’s Shelter.” Hollywood producer and writer Howard Gordon (“The X-Files,” “24,” “Homeland,” “Accused”) will receive the Honorary Golden Nymph Award, the festival’s highest accolade, bestowed on a professional for their contribution to the entertainment industry. In the Fiction competition are “Poker Face” (U.S.), starring Natasha Lyonne, “The Warrant: Breaker’s Law” (U.S.), “Ten Pound Poms” (U.K./Australia), “The Seed” (Germany, Norway, Czech Republic), “Chorus Girls” (Denmark), “Fence” (Japan), “Le Colosse aux pieds d’argile” (France), “Miró” (Spain) and “Trust No One” (Israel).

Grimes has launched a new website making it easier to replicate her voice using AI, should you want to. It was only last month that the musician gave her blessing for people to do so.The website allows users to upload audio of themselves singing or to record directly into the software via their computer microphone. Once processed, the same audio will be returned but with a computer-generated Grimes voice.“This is all a beta test so it may be imperfect at first”, she explained in a tweet.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Digital media and entertainment company NGLmitú, the result of a merger last year between NGL Collective and mitú, have launched the new Latino-focused streaming platform mitúTV. Targeting bilingual and English dominant U.S. Latinos, the service also announced three new shows: “Three Gs in a Pod,” hosted by Erik Rivera, Sasha Merci and Jesus Sepulveda; “Girl, Let Me Tell You,” hosted by Jessica Flores, Ivana Rojas and Glorelys Mora; and the game show “Spill the Chisme.” “We were more of a business-to-business type of organization,” said NGL Collective founder and CEO David Chitel, “which is why it made so much sense for us to merge with mitú, because they were the leading business-to-consumer entity connecting with we call ‘new generation Latinos.’ So the marriage of our two companies is sort of a big deal in our space.”

Amazon has launched Fire TV Channels, a new hub for free, ad-supported TV (FAST).

The 1619 Project, according to one description, “illuminates the legacy of slavery in the contemporary United States, and highlights the contributions of Black Americans to every aspect of American society.” Nothing controversial there, right? Wrong.

Soccer great Carli Lloyd definitely questioned her decision when she arrived for the filming of Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test for Fox. There wasn’t any time to prepare for the extreme heat and effort required to perform quasi-military training exercises for the entertainment of TV viewers.

The Daily Show has had a busy six months after host Trevor Noah surprised everyone by announcing he was stepping down after seven years.

With 15 seasons under its belt, RuPaul’s Drag Race doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon.

In celebration of Norman Lear’s 100th birthday, executive producers Brent Miller and David Jammy were tasked with putting together the event of the century that would live on in the ABC documentary Norman Lear: 100 Years of Music and Laughter.

Brooke Sheilds takes control of the narrative by sharing her story in her own words in the Hulu documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, from director Lana Wilson.

In Hollywood history, no Oscar-winning couple has earned greater admiration than Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The actors who were married for 50 years before Newman’s death in 2008 are the subject of the six-part CNN Films/HBO Max documentary series The Last Movie Stars, directed by Ethan Hawke, himself a four-time Oscar nominee.