Steven Gaydos Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Variety Staff Follow Us on TwitterVariety has promoted Manori Ravindran to Executive Editor of International and Senior Writer.Ravindran joined Variety in 2020 as International Editor. In her new role, Ravindran will continue to lead Variety’s award-winning team of correspondents based around the world, while expanding the brand’s presence at key festivals and markets and growing Variety’s events outside the U.S., working closely with executive VP of content, Steven Gaydos.

Angelique Jackson Producers of the indie film musical “Americana Dream” have tapped Nashville-based music artists Mary Sarah and Sam Varga to play the story’s central couple, Billie Carton and Lucky Fontana.Sarah and Varga nabbed the leading roles after an extensive nationwide search for singer-songwriters to act in the original musical written and directed by Ate de Jong and co-written by Variety’s Steven Gaydos.“Americana Dream” takes viewers behind the scenes of the film’s titular reality TV music competition program, where Lucky and Billie transition from imposters willing to do anything for money and fame, to a real couple, willing to sacrifice their dreams of success for real love and their real music. Sarah was a finalist on season 10 of NBC’s “The Voice” and is set to star in Justin Ward’s upcoming film comedy “Paradise: The Movie.” Sarah recorded her first album “Bridges,” when she was only 15; the project showcased her talent alongside country music legends including Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard and Tanya Tucker and was reissued through Time Life Records in 2020.Varga has also been performing since his early teens, releasing singles and performing regionally; his dynamic live act garnered significant attention in Austin, Texas before he relocated to Nashville in 2019.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentWith the death this week of Ralph “Sonny” Barger, national president of famed motorcycle club the Hells Angels, a piece of vibrant American pop culture history recedes farther into the past.It’s hard to appreciate today, but when Barger founded the Oakland chapter in 1957, the mythology of the outlaw biker had already been emblazoned on the national consciousness through the Hells Angels’ impact on fashion, movies and music, as a symbol of rebellion. Barger’s death on June 29 at the age of 83 made international headlines because of that reach.Barger was the face of the Hells Angels for decades, but the origin story of the Hells Angels began nearly a decade before when the club was founded in Fontana, Calif., in 1948.

Jenelle Riley Deputy Awards, Features EditorVariety has named its 10 Comics to Watch for 2022. This year’s honorees will be profiled in the July 20 issue of Variety and be honored at this year’s Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, held in Montreal July 13-31.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentNearly a half-century has passed since Elvis left the building, permanently. Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann has just unleashed “Elvis,” his big, bold, nearly three-hour biopic, at Cannes and that Warner Bros. bet appears to have paid off.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentActress-director Anjelica Huston may have been born into film royalty and may have fulfilled that royal destiny by becoming the third generation, after actor grandfather Walter and director-actor-writer father John Huston, to score Oscar gold, but her early innings were not the stuff cinema dreams are made of.“Casino Royale” is the film where she first appeared, as an uncredited young teen 55 years ago this month. It is largely regarded as an overcooked comedy fiasco, or as Variety deemed it back then, “an attempt to spoof the pants off the James Bond.” The film had no less than five directors, including her father, John.Variety was kinder to John Huston’s 1969 film “A Walk with Love and Death,” Anjelica’s first starring role, but most other outlets were tougher on the film and Huston’s performance, and it came and went with little notice. In a vain attempt to overcome that fate, 20th Century Fox publicity took Anjelica and her costar, Assi Dayan (son of Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan) on a multi-city promo tour and ran this quirky early branded content item in Variety:“Assaf Dayan romances his costar Anjelica Huston, under the watchful eye of her director-father, John Huston.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentThe first time Bob Dylan was mentioned in Variety was 60 years ago on March 28, 1962. The article’s thesis was that the indie labels were more adept at breaking new music acts.

Cynthia Littleton Business EditorVariety has promoted veteran editors Diane Garrett, Carole Horst and Terry Flores, giving the trio expanded oversight of the weekly magazine and more than two dozen Extra Editions published annually.Garrett and Horst have been promoted to Deputy Editor. Flores has advanced to Senior Production Editor.

Cynthia Littleton Business EditorVariety has struck an exclusive editorial agreement with news service Film New Europe to augment its coverage of growing content markets across Eastern and Central Europe.The partnership gives Variety access to Film New Europe’s roster of top journalists dedicated to reporting on the rapid expansion of media and entertainment in 18 countries, including Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria and Croatia. At a time when global markets have never been more vital to the business of Hollywood, the alliance with Film New Europe allows Variety to bring more essential news and analysis to its audience of industry professionals.The pact is “a continuation of Variety‘s commitment to covering global show business which began, in essence, with our very first issue in 1905,” said Steven Gaydos, Variety‘s Executive Editor of Global Content, who spearheaded the deal.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentDecades ago, in his landmark “Biographical Dictionary of Film,” critic David Thomson said of filmmaking legend Francis Coppola: “No one retains so many jubilant traits of the kid moviemaker.” As Coppola approaches production on “Megalopolis,” his biggest, most creatively ambitious project of the 21st century, that description seems more apt than ever.And a quick glance at the Variety archives vividly illustrates Coppola’s explosive emergence as a veritable force of nature while still enrolled as a film student at UCLA.The wunderkind announced his arrival with his name blasted in a Variety page one headline as the winner of a student screenwriting competition.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentThe Critics Choice Assn. has selected Billy Crystal to receive this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s ceremony on March 13.A Billy Crystal life achievement reel might look a lot like a history of American showbiz.

William Earl Variety will shine a spotlight on the controversy over changes to this year’s Academy Awards telecast with a virtual panel featuring Oscar winners and current nominees in the award categories that will be removed from the live telecast.“Variety Artisans: Special Report” will be available for viewing Friday, March 4 on Variety.com. Moderated by Jazz Tangcay, Senior Artisans Editor for Variety, the lineup features past Oscar winners and current nominees in the eight craft- and technology-focused categories that will no longer be presented live as part of ABC’s March 27 telecast of the 94th Academy Awards.“Variety pioneered deep coverage of the artisans of the entertainment world back in the 1990s.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentOnce upon a time in Holly-wood, and to be more precise, in the mid-’60s and ’70s, young Hollywood filmmakers saw what their “auteur director” counterparts around the world were doing with the cinematic arts, and they wanted some of that freedom of expression and fearless boundary-busting for themselves. From Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” to Bergman’s “Persona” to Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” the action in creative storytelling was all over the place, except in Hollywood.So Hollywood’s best and brightest young artists accepted the challenge.The result was called New Hollywood, and the films that resulted from that impulse to innovate and experiment with forms and subject matter included “The Pawnbroker,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “Mean Streets,” “The Conversation,” “French Connection,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “The Wild Bunch” and myriad other lively, edgy masterpieces of American film.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentThis story was first published in Daily Variety in June 2001.The last time Ivan Reitman was near the Czech Republic, it was the middle of the night in 1960, outside the Slovakian town of his birth, Komárno. He was 3, and he and his Holocaust survivor parents were trying to get the hell away from Communist tyranny.It shouldn’t be a great shock, then, to learn that the director-producer isn’t completely at ease about the July 6 premiere of his “Evolution” at the Karlovy Vary film fest.His ambivalence is plain.

Yet some suspect such measures are merely a case of deckchair rearrangement. “I don’t believe the host ever has an impact on ratings,” says Anne Thomson, editor-at-large at IndieWire. Indeed previous efforts to woo the under 30s with hosts such as Seth Macfarlane, James Franco and Anne Hathaway have been spectacular flops.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentNearly 50 years after his passing, 2022 Texas Heritage Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Lefty Frizzell remains one of the indisputable pillars of country music. His influence on another country music giant, the late Merle Haggard, is both profound and clear to anyone with ears. Haggard’s vocal style developed in the 1950s when Frizzell’s impact was at its peak.

Variety Staff Follow Us on TwitterVariety has promoted Dea Lawrence to Chief Operating and Marketing Officer.Lawrence has dramatically expanded Variety‘s business operations since she rejoined the brand in 2015 as Chief Marketing Officer. She led the reimagining of Variety’s thriving roster of annual events and summits by pivoting at the start of the pandemic to the creation of the Variety Streaming Room virtual franchise.Along with Steven Gaydos, Variety‘s Executive Vice President of Global Content, Lawrence created the Variety Content Studio, which includes both brand storytelling and sponsored video series.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentOne thing that all the great, iconic, landmark Hollywood films of any era have in common is universality. As Clint Eastwood’s iconic serial killer thriller “Dirty Harry” turns 50 this week, the Don Siegel film’s rocky critical reception back in 1971 only temporarily obscured the pic’s primal pull and lasting (not “Sudden”) impact.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentAmong its many surprising pieces of entertainment history arcana, the Variety Archives contain stories from the 1930s involving an arena sadly familiar to business managers: government seizures of entertainers’ assets. But these seizures took place not because of any financial malfeasance, but because the artists were Jewish.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentLifelong addiction to Looney Tunes and their imaginary characters and real creators is not required to enjoy journalist Jaime Weinman’s “Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes,” but it will help the reader stay engaged when the tome becomes, shall we say, a bit academic.Any “serious” accounting of that place once known as “Termite Terrace” on the Warner lot is immediately courting danger when the imaginary subjects of your

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentEntertainment mogul Byron Allen’s résumé lists Fairfax High and USC as the Los Angeles educational institutions of his formative years. Not to diminish their importance, when you hear Allen describing his youthful days when his single mother “couldn’t afford daycare” and plopped young Byron down at NBC where she worked, it’s quickly obvious that Allen had the world’s greatest showbiz teachers in the halls of a network television production center.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentThere are still millions of Americans among us who remember where they were when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Jenelle Riley Deputy Awards, Features EditorVariety has selected its annual list of 10 Brits to Watch, an honor the publication has been bestowing since 2013. Honorees, which will be profiled in the Nov.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentFilm history is filled with examples of screenwriters whose subsequent dazzling directorial careers have often eclipsed their brilliant roots as writers. Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and Sam Peckinpah are only three of the American wordsmiths-turned-helmers that come to mind.

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentFrance’s Ministry of Culture gave a French toast to Variety’s Steven Gaydos on Thursday, naming him a chevalier/knight for his decades of work in entertainment.Julie Duhaut-Bedos, consul general of France in Los Angeles, reminded the crowd that only a few such awards are handed out yearly, to “people who have distinguished themselves by their creations in the artistic or literary field or by the contribution they have made to the influence of arts and letters in

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterSharpened Iron Studios has acquired the original musical screenplay “Amarillo” and has enlisted European filmmaker Ate de Jong to direct the film.“Amarillo,” written by Variety’s executive VP of global content Steven Gaydos, is set behind the scenes of a reality TV music competition series and tells the story of two young singer-songwriters who pretend to be lovers for the camera and end up becoming a real-life couple.“Amarillo” will feature 16 original

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentThe late American indie film auteur Monte Hellman was fond of a quote from Jean Cocteau that poetically summed up the fate of any real work of art: “A work of art should also be ‘an object difficult to pick up.’ It must protect itself from vulgar pawing, which tarnishes and disfigures it. It should be made of such a shape that people don’t know which way to hold it, which embarrasses and irritates the critics, incites them to be rude, but keeps it fresh.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentIf there’s one pop music artist from the ’60s who fits the mood of the moment we’re in, it’s the gentle U.K. singer-songwriter Donovan.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentJust as Jean Girard so memorably noted in “Talladega Nights,” “God needs the Devil. The Beatles needed the Rolling Stones, even Diane Sawyer needed Katie Couric,” one could add that “Bob Dylan needed Donovan.”It’s been 56 years since we saw Dylan and Donovan side by side during Dylan’s famous knockabout 1965 tour, chronicled in D.A.

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of ContentBy the end of 1970, the war in Vietnam had again claimed thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Vietnamese lives, and if you were a 19-year-old guy in either place, you were probably wondering how to make sure you’d still be around to see the end of 1971.  I know I was. That summer, the Temptations conjured a great little “psychedelic soul” record that summarized the mood for young people like me pretty well: “Segregation, determination,