Latest news with #FamilyTies'
Perth Now
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Jason Segel hails Shrinking co-star Michael J. Fox
Michael J. Fox has been a "huge inspiration" for Jason Segel. The 63-year-old actor stars alongside Jason, 45, in the Apple TV series 'Shrinking', and Jason has relished the experience of working with one of his idols. Jason - who starred on 'How I Met Your Mother' from 2005 until 2014 - told People: "I got the chance to tell him that he was a huge inspiration to me while I was in a weirdly similar situation doing 'How I Met Your Mother' and movies at the same time and being tired. "We always would talk about Michael J. Fox and what he was doing with 'Back to the Future' and 'Family Ties' at the same time. He's an idol for sure." Bill Lawrence, the co-creator of 'Shrinking', previously revealed that Michael served as the inspiration for the comedy-drama series. The 56-year-old producer explained that Michael's journey with Parkinson's disease inspired Harrison Ford's on-screen character, who is also battling the neurodegenerative disease. Bill - who previously worked with Michael on 'Spin City' - told People: "It's cool to get to write about things you care about now. And Michael J. Fox is my first mentor. So we wanted to represent it in hopefully an inspiring and not sad or tragic way." Bill has been amazed by how Michael has coped with his health struggles. He shared: "I found the first mentor in my life and career, Michael J. Fox, to be so inspiring with the way he took it in stride and continues to work harder than anybody I know. And we want to kind of carry that spirit if we can into the show." Meanwhile, Michael previously admitted that his meteoric rise "made no sense" to him. The actor - who moved from Canada to the US at the age of 18 - initially struggled to find work in Hollywood, but he ultimately shot to international stardom as Marty McFly in the 'Back to the Future' franchise. He told 'Entertainment Tonight': "I was dumpster diving because I knew the grocery store would throw baked goods out. We'd steal jam and peanut butter from the IHOP or Denny's. It was a tough existence. "But in a relatively short period of time I was famous and I was the biggest movie star in the world ... It was crazy. It made no sense."
Wall Street Journal
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
TV and Movies for America's Vast Middle
Grapevine, Texas I grew up in the 1970s and '80s. My conception of life in the adult world was formed to a great extent by television and movies. As a teenager I didn't have much in the way of insight, but I did notice one difference between my own experience and the world portrayed on screen: In the worlds of 'Happy Days,' 'The Jeffersons,' 'Three's Company' 'Family Ties' and a thousand other shows and movies, religion had no place, except occasionally as an object of ridicule. No character in these productions, or none I recall, expressed a serious thought about God or faith or religious practice or doctrinal leaning. Millions of Americans for whom religious belief is a normal part of life learned to accept this absence. But it felt unnatural. Based in New York and Los Angeles, America's entertainment industry has long ignored the interests and worldviews of ordinary religious people in the country's vast middle. That has begun to change. Technological improvements—roughly from the development of the digital camera to the rise of streaming platforms—have enabled independent filmmakers across the country to produce high-quality movies and series that explore themes mainstream studios don't understand and prefer to ignore. That's the supply side. The demand side is ready for new stuff. That there are enormous numbers of American viewers who will pay to watch well-made films that avoid gratuitous crudity and sacrilege and present religious sentiment as typically human was made evident by the unpredicted success of 'Sound of Freedom,' the 2023 movie starring Jim Caviezel as a former government agent whose belief in God leads him to rescue children from sex traffickers. It was distributed by the Provo, Utah-based Angel Studios and took in $250.5 million in gross revenue against a $14.5 million budget. Two of the most talented filmmakers in this burgeoning field are the brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin. Their films aren't 'Christian' in any didactic or proselytizing sense. Erwin movies are what might be termed faith-adjacent. Their films' protagonists, like most people in most places at all times in human history, respond to life's blows by turning to God for aid and direction. 'American Underdog,' a 2021 movie about Kurt Warner, the quarterback who didn't make the NFL draft but eventually led the St. Louis Rams to a Super Bowl victory, is as well-acted and skillfully filmed as any Hollywood sports movie. The Erwin brothers' 'Jesus Revolution,' starring Kelsey Grammer and Jonathan Roumie, is a sympathetic but not uncritical account of Southern California's 'Jesus people' movement of the late 1960s and '70s. 'Jesus Revolution' grossed $54 million against a $15 million production budget. Jon Erwin's latest venture is a streaming series released on Amazon on Feb. 27: 'House of David,' a dramatic adaptation of the life of Israel's second and greatest king, co-directed by Mr. Erwin and Jon Gunn. The first season was filmed in Greece last year under the auspices of the Wonder Project, a new company headed by Mr. Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Merryman Hoogstraten. 'I've been dreaming of telling the story of David since I was 16 years old,' Mr. Erwin, 42, says in an interview at the Gaylord Texan hotel, where the National Religious Broadcasters are hosting their annual conference. As a young boy, Mr. Erwin traveled to Israel with his father. 'He bought me my first camera, the best gift I've ever had. We made this walk-and-talk documentary. It was just the two of us, and we went to all the holy sites.' What he remembers most is going to the tomb of David in Jerusalem. 'Right there, my imagination started turning.' In our conversation he refers to himself as an 'artist,' and the term isn't amiss—'House of David' is a superb piece of filmmaking. But apart from the black ring on his left hand, there's no outward sign Mr. Erwin is a creative type at all. No tattoos, no oddball eyeglass frames or retro attire, just close-cropped light brown hair, ordinary jacket and chinos. His filmmaking debut, he says, came when he was 15 and somebody was short a cameraman at a University of Alabama football game: 'Some guy got sick and they needed a replacement. That's how I got into this industry.' With each of his previous films, Mr. Erwin says, he has been 'trying to get good enough at the craft to take on what I consider the Mount Everest of stories,' the epic of David. He's right to revere that story. The biblical Book of Samuel, where most of David's story is told—I and II and Samuel in modern Bibles—is a masterpiece: an epic history of the origins of Israel's monarchy and of the rise, near-fall and restoration of Israel's greatest king; a political-philosophical treatise on the necessity and dangers of human government; and a model of stylistic efficiency, thematic unity and unsparing realism. 'The story of David,' the Hebrew scholar Robert Alter writes in his 1999 commentary on the Book of Samuel, 'is probably the greatest single narrative representation in antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh.' I have felt for many years that the story of David is ripe for cinematic treatment. But I worried that any attempt by a Hollywood studio to dramatize it would ride roughshod over the Book of Samuel's beautifully constructed narrative and extract from it 21st-century social-political messages that aren't there. Mr. Erwin can be trusted not to commit those errors, believing as he does—readers may agree or disagree—that the text is revelatory of God's character. He grew up in a churchgoing family in Birmingham, Ala., and like many Protestants of a conservative bent was made to read the Bible cover to cover and memorize large parts of it. When Mr. Erwin was 6 or 7, a Sunday school teacher promised to take any student who memorized a stack of verses to an amusement park. 'I wanted to go to Six Flags,' he says. 'I memorized them all. And I went.' Thus began a life of scriptural study and memorization. I'm not surprised, then, watching 'House of David,' to note the care with which it treats biblical texts. The series contains plenty of dramatic material not in the Bible—the Hebrew histories are famously laconic, and any screen adaptation would require narrative supplements—but nothing in the biblical text is substantively changed. The extrabiblical story lines, moreover, consist of interpretations of, not deviations from, the text. One example: In the Bible, when the prophet Samuel visits David's home and asks his father, Jesse, to gather all his sons, he calls only seven of the eight—for reasons not specified in the text. Jesse is forced by the prophet to call the eighth and youngest, the shepherd David, from the fields. Why is the father ashamed of the boy? In 'House of David,' Mr. Erwin has interpreted verses from two Davidic Psalms—'I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me' (51:5) and 'I have become a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother's sons' (69:8)—to speculate that David was the son of a non-Hebrew mother whom his father married after the death of his first wife. There is no record of such a union, but the scenario would explain the contempt with which David's eldest brother, Eliab, treats him when he arrives to hear Goliath taunting the Israelite army (I Samuel 17:28). Everything in the show is not in the Bible, Mr. Erwin acknowledges more than once, but he insists 'everything in the Bible is in the show. We talked to theologians and historians and rabbinic scholars. In the end, the goal of the thing was to create a great TV show.' Which, in my view, it is. And I'm not alone. 'House of David' debuted at No. 8 on Variety's streaming original charts, behind the second season of '1923' and the third of 'Reacher' but ahead of 'Landman.' Since I spoke to Mr. Erwin just before its release in late February, 'House of David' has done well enough to merit a second season. He is back in Greece filming it now. Meanwhile, the finale of its first season—in which the young shepherd encounters the massive warrior Goliath in the Valley of Elah (I Samuel 17)—appeared on Thursday. I wonder if the success of the Erwin brothers' films, and of other faith-adjacent productions generally, signifies some broader cultural shift: a new openness to unironic virtue, perhaps, or a discontent with stories that studiously ignore the sacred. 'There is a longing for content that, as I like to say, restores faith in things worth believing in,' Mr. Erwin says. 'Things you can watch with your kids or your parents. If you think about what that screen'—he gestures to a nearby wall-mounted television—'when it first came out, it was something that gathered everybody around it. 'I Love Lucy,' Andy Griffith, Carol Burnett. It gave multiple generations a common experience, and typically that common experience left you feeling you could aspire to a better version of yourself.' Mr. Erwin repudiates any suggestion that movies, TV shows and documentaries—'content,' to use his bloodless word, for which alas there is no convenient synonym—must be morally disinfected or artificially wholesome. 'House of David,' like the biblical story on which it's based, is full of envy, violence, lust and strife. But its hero is—here I have to use dated language—a clean and upright man. Mr. Erwin points me to remarks recently delivered by Vince Gilligan, creator of 'Breaking Bad,' the AMC series (2008-13) featuring one of the great antiheroes of modern television: the onetime school teacher, later meth dealer and all-around crime lord Walter White. 'For decades, we made the villains too sexy,' Mr. Gilligan said on receiving an award from the Writers Guild of America. 'Maybe what the world needs now are some good old-fashioned Greatest Generation-types who give more than they take—who think that kindness, tolerance and sacrifice aren't strictly for chumps.' Mr. Erwin thinks of his work as in some way supplying newer, nobler heroes. 'In my career, I can't recall a moment like this, when these types of resources are being given to creators like me'—that is, to filmmakers telling biblical and faith-adjacent stories—'in a way that allows us to keep creative control. It really is an amazing moment.' Two items make me think Mr. Erwin might be on to something about this cultural 'moment' we're in. First, 'Anora' won five Academy Awards on March 2, including best picture and best director. The movie is about a tough-minded stripper and prostitute—sex worker, to use the current term. A finely crafted film, I gather, but hardly one that can, as Mr. Erwin might put it, attract a multigenerational audience. That the major Hollywood-based studios have declined in both revenue and cultural influence over the past decade is, perhaps, not so hard to explain. Second, a Pew Research study published last month concluded that the share of Americans identifying as Christian has held more or less steady for the past five years, halting—'at least for now,' as the study says—a decades-long decline. Is America poised for a resurgence in religious belief? If so, I have to think 'content' creators like Mr. Erwin will find themselves in the center of it. In the meantime, Mr. Erwin offers the simple hope that his biblical adaptation will spur viewers to read the book on which it's based, rather as Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy persuaded many of its viewers to read J.R.R. Tolkien's original. 'I remember when some Amazon executives read the scripts for 'House of David' for the first time,' Mr. Erwin recalls. 'They said, These are really good. I said, It's based on a best-seller, man. Five billion copies sold. It's a good book. You should check it out.' Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Justine Bateman tells young voters to ignore the media 'panic frenzy' and make up their own minds
"Family Ties" star Justine Bateman implored young voters to think for themselves in elections rather than pledging themselves to a "political team." "If you're under 30, you've most likely been convinced that you need to politically 'resist the other side.' You've been cheated," Bateman wrote in a post on X Wednesday. Instead, she said voters should "insist" candidates "audition for your vote" and that voters "examine their actions objectively and decide if, in the big picture, this is benefiting America as a whole." Justine Bateman Calls For Gavin Newsom To Be Removed Amid La Fires 'Before Something Worse Happens' "This is not about parties or pledging fealty to a 'political team.' This is about your right as an American adult to not be told by the media or the oldest people in either party how you should be interpreting policies and actions," Bateman wrote. She added people need to ignore the "ridiculous insistence that you give yourself a heart attack over nothing" and tell anyone who insists otherwise to "zip it." Read On The Fox News App "They disrespect your intelligence and innate wisdom," Bateman wrote. "Their weird panic frenzy is an anomaly, birthed in 2016. It's not the norm, and you intuitively know it. You don't need them. Make up your own mind. And then let it go, so you can so all those things that have nothing to do with politics." Bateman made a similar declaration in a viral X thread after President Donald Trump's election in November, describing the last four years as "walking on eggshells." "I have found the last four years to be an almost intolerable period. A very un-American period in that any questioning, any opinions, any likes or dislikes were held up to a very limited list of 'permitted positions' in order to assess acceptability," Bateman posted on X. 'Family Ties' Star Justine Bateman Slams 'Un-american Period' Over The Last 4 Years: 'Common Sense Discarded' "I am neither one extreme or the other, but am one of the millions of people who believe in common sense, and that everyone should be free to live their lives however they want, unless that freedom interferes with someone else's freedom to live their own life. That's it," she concluded. Bateman also described Trump's election as a "kind of suffocating cloud" being lifted on free speech. "Regular people who had questions about decisions that were being made were threatened subtly or obviously into silence. And I feel like that's been broken, that sort of suppression has been kind of broken," Bateman told Fox News article source: Justine Bateman tells young voters to ignore the media 'panic frenzy' and make up their own minds
