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Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Hollywood Is Feeding the Frenzy Around the Epstein Files
What did the president really know about a cushy remote getaway for the private-plane elite? No, not that president and not that conspiracy — I'm talking about Paradise, Dan Fogelman's crackling Hulu drama in which James Marsden plays a commander-in-chief with secret plans to ferry the privileged to a deep-in-the-mountain community when an apocalypse befalls Earth. More from The Hollywood Reporter Trump Files $10 Billion Lawsuit Against News Corp., Rupert Murdoch Over Story on Epstein Ties Epstein, Diddy Prosecutor Maurene Comey Speaks Out After Firing: "Fear Is The Tool of a Tyrant" Trump Reacts to 'Late Show' Ending: "I Absolutely Love That Colbert Got Fired" The show earned a surprise Emmy drama nomination this week, just as some figures on both the right and left were busy resurrecting their favorite real-world thriller: the tangled conspiracy theories surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Paradise is fiction. The Epstein saga is not. But both feel cut from the same cloth of powerful people and the secrets they keep from us. Hollywood has actually spent decades on exactly this kind of story, chronicling conspiracies at the highest but darkest levels of government, crimes committed by the very people charged with protecting us. From the moment Warren Beatty started hunting around for a Senator-assassination coverup in The Parallax View back in the '70's, we've been subject to a steady parade of buried files, vanishing witnesses and covert programs — and inevitably the lone heroes who root them all out. Mulder and Scully solved those mysteries the FBI didn't want solved on The X-Files, Jason Bourne figured out what Conklin was actually up to at the CIA in The Bourne Identity, and most recently, The Night Agent and Paradise had some very plucky marginal types figure out what's really happening at the White House. So when a story pops up like Epstein, with all its mysterious millions and powerful people in the (sometimes literal) background, with all its legitimately open questions about a suspect with White House connections dying in federal custody, we're primed not just to see a news story — we're primed to see a movie. Without them or even us knowing it, the entertainment industry has been readying us for this story for fifty years. On their own, of course, most of these Hollywood government-coverup tales are harmless and even welcome entertainments, fertilizer for the human imagination. But pour on it the fuel of our polarized politics and algorithmic outrage and watch it explode. A story like Epstein is colliding with personal beliefs and prejudices (it's hard to avoid the anti-elite and at times, frankly, antisemitic undercurrents here), along with Trump's own history of Hollywood-derived conspiracy showmanship on QAnon and Obama birther theory, to detonate in, well, exactly the ways we're seeing now. Hollywood tells these stories by dramatic imperative — dangling that the truth is out there makes for much better storytelling than suggesting those mysterious lights were just illuminating the path of an airplane. So It feels too easy to implicate film and television in this factless frenzy. But it's also a cop-out to exempt them entirely. As the film critic Laura Venning wrote in the journal Curzon last year, while movies like Oliver Stone's JFK feel 'akin to a guilty pleasure' and 'you could certainly question whether there's any harm' to them, a 'decade ago the idea that a former President could instigate an insurrection over patently false claims that an election had been stolen from him would [also] have been unimaginable.' Sometimes Hollywood stories do involve real criminality, as with All the President's Men. More often though they have tilted toward JFK, cozying up just close enough to the truth to make us believe in non-existent cabals. And nothing suggests a cabal like the news story du jour. The Epstein Files is fast-becoming the JFK of our time, only it's playing out not in a lone Oliver Stone weekend movie-theater release but in our pockets and on our laptops, on airport cable-news broadcasts and bar-side phone-scrolling, the appeal of drama lapping the need for verification. A convicted sex offender killed himself in 2019 in federal prison awaiting trial after a whole set of fresh revelations of alleged sex trafficking. That left both a black hole where the alleged perpetrator's testimony would have gone and a juicy mystery left unsolved; if it wasn't a suicide, as the government was saying, who might have wanted Epstein dead? Numerous investigations followed, with many Rolodexes and other material published to sate the beast. All accompanied by tell of elusive 'files' that would supposedly implicate all kinds of powerful people on some mythical list. With so many Internet sources to listen to and publish on, the public had a chance to be the hero of the story, all these hints of Gilbert Joubert Three Days of the Condor supervillainy just begging us to summon our inner Robert Redford to find him out. Thus began the years of theories that Epstein was murdered as part of a conspiracy to conceal the sex crimes of powerful people, fed by noticeable but mostly unremarkable anomalies, like the modification of prison footage. With his opaque history and sources of wealth, his super-powerful friends and his immoral appetites, Epstein became the perfect avatar for our at-home Hollywood heroism. The story also uncommonly played to both sides of the political spectrum, the right's suspicion of government and the left's suspicion of the wealthy — a perfect horseshoe. As producers of The Fugitive and its Big Pharma bogeyman could tell you, a good conspiracy is made even better when it can be aimed at someone or some group already disliked. The Epstein Files became the ideal slate onto which both Democrats and Republicans could each project their supervillain fantasies. Trump himself led the charge. In his first term, he retweeted an outlandish theory that Bill Clinton was involved in Epstein's murder — his and his allies' go-to family secretly behind all kinds of killings (Seth Rich, Vince Foster). Trump at the time said that 'I want a full investigation, and that's what I absolutely am demanding.' J.D. Vance played along, during the campaign last year, saying that it was 'an important thing' to release the list, never mind if it actually existed. But once a MAGA-driven phenomenon, the script has flipped. Democrats are hammering the president on the issue now, trying to rally support in Congress to force Trump to reveal more findings, a push that resonates with an increasingly conspiracy-minded segment of the left and its distrust of legacy media. The story is playing to their favorite supervillain: Trump. (That narrative was fed this week when the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump in 2003 had sent Epstein a birthday card with a lewd drawing that implied the two had a 'secret.') Meanwhile, the president himself has uncharacteristically gone from Mulder to Scully, casting himself as the skeptic in the primetime conspiracy-drama he once created. 'Their [the left's] new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this 'bullshit,' hook, line, and sinker,' the president wrote on Truth Social Wednesday, after telling reporters on Tuesday night 'I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody; it's pretty boring stuff' and after Attorney General Pam Bondi said a few days earlier the investigation was closed. The truth is not out there, and can we please go back to talking about Rosie O'Donnell? One way to view this two-party interest is expediency — each side, at one time or another, believed the other had more figures on whatever list probably doesn't exist. But the dual Democrat-Republican fascination with The Epstein Files also testifies to a truth Hollywood has forever known: a love of conspiracy stories tugs at us all. The Jason Bourne movies sold $800 million-worth of tickets in the U.S., and Democrats and Republicans each bought lots of them. The rise of conspiracy theories is a massively complex topic, with studies suggesting a whole slew of social and technological factors. No batch of fictional movies, no matter how exciting, would directly lead to the rise of any conspiracy theory. But it's easy to see how Hollywood has primed us to be ready to jump on one when it presents itself, especially if it comes at a moment already seeded with huge mistrust of elites and media and, yes, a growing culture of antisemitism. The anti-Jewish codings in all this are hard to avoid, with the longtime ridiculous and hateful caricature of Epstein as a Mossad agent running a blackmail ring for the Israeli government continuing to abide. Last weekend's Elmo hackers demanded an Epstein file release even as they were saying 'Kill All Jews,' among other antisemitic vileness and insanities, such as the idea Trump wasn't releasing the list because Netanyahu told him not to. Conspiracy theories are fun. The real world is monochromatic, straightforward, boring. Occam's Razor doesn't cut very deep. More complex hidden explanations are thrilling. (And, as with periodic events like Watergate or Iran-Contra, real just often enough.) True-crime podcasts and its unofficial streaming spinoff, Only Murders in the Building have long realized this fact and savvily played to it, as have earlier 21st-century TV hits like Search Party and Veronica Mars. Like the people 'seeking answers' on Epstein, these stories flatter their protagonists and the audience: Only the sharp few have the vision to spot what's really going on. And the real-world interest in conspiracy theories provides a feedback loop for Hollywood to make more of these stories see under: Ryan Coogler developing a new X-Files for these jittery 2020s times — which powers and makes these real-world theories even more fun. Of course, fun and true are two entirely different creatures. In recent years, the proliferation of digital content and those invidious algorithms have also personalized the phenomenon, turning us all into active amateur gumshoes, even if the truth we sleuth becomes nonsense like COVID-19 vaccines as government tracking devices and a Hillary Clinton-led sex ring run out of a pizza shop. Why watch Alan Pakula when we can be Alan Pakula? One of the rare recent TV exercises not to indulge conspiracy-theory tropes but deconstruct and criticize them was Netflix's winter limited series Zero Day, in which the British actor Dan Stevens played a villainous YouTuber peddling such theories. Asked how much tech platforms were responsible for these theories compared to politicians or the peddlers themselves, Stevens told THR, 'The system. The system is driving it. Those putting it out, those consuming it, everyone. It's a triangle.' What he left out is that Hollywood may be yet another point on that geometry, with its enjoyable but potentially incept-y ideas of an alternate truth the government doesn't want us to see. To be clear: Hollywood can and should tell conspiracy-theory stories. They're exciting entertainment, and that should always be the industry's first objective. But that doesn't mean they don't influence the culture. Venning, the Curzon critic, was writing her essay on Fly Me to the Moon, last year's Apple film, with another harmless but still potentially insidious idea that a moon landing was shot on a sound stage. Nearly half of all people under the age of 45 now are at least unsure of whether NASA actually landed on the moon, according to a recent University of New Hampshire study, and obviously, school didn't teach them that. In the film, Scarlett Johansson even has the cheeky meta line 'I think we should have gotten Kubrick.' As it happens, Kubrick himself sits at the center of Epstein conspiracy-mongering, with a running Internet theory that the sex-party scene in Eyes Wide Shut was an attempt by the late director to stealthily expose Epstein. You don't want to know. Best of The Hollywood Reporter From 'Party in the U.S.A.' to 'Born in the U.S.A.': 20 of America's Most Patriotic (and Un-Patriotic) Musical Offerings Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More Hollywood's Most Notable Deaths of 2025 Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dear Emmys: Stop Letting a Handful of Shows Dominate the Acting Categories
This year's Emmy nominations are out, and I'm happy to see many of my favorite shows honored with nominations. But I just wish Emmy voters would find a way to honor more shows — especially in the acting categories. In recent years, a troubling trend has emerged at the Emmys, with a select handful of shows hogging all of the nominations in the major acting categories. I love Severance as much as any Emmy voter, but I was still surprised when it landed nine (!) acting nominations, including three for best supporting actor in a drama. I also love spending a vacation at The White Lotus, but it managed to gobble up eight acting nods, including four for best supporting actress in a drama. (Lotus also tips the scales by submitting all of its main cast members in the supporting categories, leaving them to fight it out for a few slots.) More from TVLine Kathy Bates Sets Emmys Record With Her Matlock Nomination - Watch the Emotional On-Set Celebration Days of Our Lives' Susan Seaforth Hayes Addresses Daytime Emmys Snub: 'Perhaps the Judges Thought I Wasn't Acting?' BET Awards 2025: How to Watch Tonight's Ceremony Online Let's look at the best supporting actor in a drama category as a prime example: Six of the seven nominees come from either Severance or The White Lotus, with Paradise's James Marsden as the lone outlier. Now I don't begrudge any of the nominees their honor — yay, Tramell Tillman! — but surely there were great performances on other dramas this year that could have used a smidge of recognition here. What about Andor? Industry? Squid Game? Interview With the Vampire? And don't even get me started on the guest acting categories, where The Studio somehow snagged five of the six nominations for best guest actor in a comedy. Should we just rename the category Outstanding Guest Actor on The Studio? This, of course, is a huge disservice to television in general, with dozens of worthy shows left on the outside looking in while a few favored shows take all the glory. The Emmys are a golden opportunity for Hollywood to highlight great TV series that haven't gotten the buzz they deserve and let viewers know about all the hidden gems out there. (As we all know, there's way too much TV to keep track of these days.) But when Emmy voters get blinders on and zero in on just a few shows, plugging in multiple cast members for each on their ballots and calling it a day, it robs the industry of a powerful promotional tool. Millions of eyes are looking at the Emmy nominees today; wouldn't it be great to introduce a few of them to a show they didn't know about before but would absolutely love? To solve this crisis, I'd like to propose a rule for future Emmy years: no more than two acting nominees from a single show in a single category. That would lead to some hard choices, yes, but it would spread the wealth in a way that I think would benefit everyone, opening the Emmys up to new blood and shaking up stale races. Because as much as I love Severance and The White Lotus? I love television in general even more. Do you think the Emmys are relying too heavily on a few shows for acting nominations? Which shows were you hoping to see snag more nods this year? Hit the comments below and tell us! Emmys 2025: See All the Nominations! View List Best of TVLine 90+ TV Shows That Switched Networks — And How Long They Ran After They Relocated TV's 30+ Best Cliffhangers of All Time From Buffy, Friends, Grey's Anatomy, Twin Peaks, Severance, Soap and More 20+ Age-Defying Parent-Child Castings From Blue Bloods, ER, Ginny & Georgia, Golden Girls, Supernatural and More Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Paradise' surprises again! How the drama shocked the Emmys
Even as a show known for its twists, Paradise still managed to pull off a few surprises on Emmy nominations morning. The Hulu series secured four nominations total, all in major categories. The first season of the show from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman was nominated for Best Drama Series, Drama Actor for its lead Sterling K. Brown, Drama Supporting Actor for James Marsden, and Drama Supporting Actress for Julianne Nicholson (a double nominee today). More from Gold Derby 'Adolescence' star Ashley Walters celebrates Emmy nomination with a family day at the zoo and Cheesecake Factory Breaking down the 2025 Emmy nominations: 'Severance' is boss, 'The Penguin' flies, and everything else we learned And while Brown's nomination was predicted by Gold Derby users, the other three were far from sure things. This morning, Paradise was sitting at No. 9 in the Best Drama Series predictions, just outside the range of nominations. It ultimately snuck into the category when the sixth-ranked show, Squid Game, failed to make the cut. The upsets were even more extreme in Marsden's and Nicholson's categories. Both the supporting actor and supporting actress were sitting at No. 18 in their respective categories. Nicholson made it into the nominees list over favored contenders like The Diplomat's Allison Janney, The White Lotus' Leslie Bibb, and The Last of Us' Isabel Merced. Marsden made a similar leap in Best Supporting Actor. His nomination came over more highly predicted performers like Slow Horses' Jack Lowden, Squid Game's Choi Seung-hyun, and The White Lotus' Patrick Schwarzenegger. On the other hand, Gold Derby voters nailed the lineup for Best Drama Actor, going five for five with their predictions. Brown was nominated alongside Severance's Adam Scott, The Pitt's Noah Wyle, Slow Horses' Gary Oldman, and The Last of Us' Pedro Pascal. Best of Gold Derby Everything to know about 'The Pitt' Season 2, including the departure of Tracy Ifeachor's Dr. Collins Everything to know about 'Too Much,' Lena Dunham's Netflix TV show starring Megan Stalter that's kinda, sorta 'based on a true story' Cristin Milioti, Amanda Seyfried, Michelle Williams, and the best of our Emmy Limited Series/Movie Actress interviews Click here to read the full article.
Daily Mail
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Iconic Stephen King novel is being adapted for the THIRD time... and fans aren't happy about it
One of Stephen King's most popular books is getting adapted for the screen for a third time - and fans aren't happy about it. According to Deadline, Doug Liman will direct a theatrical adaptation of King's The Stand. Released in 1978, King's epic post-apocalyptic novel centers on factions of people trying to survive after a deadly pandemic. The lengthy tome was acclaimed by critics and went on to become one of the author's bestselling books. It's been adapted twice before for television, first in 1994 as a four episode miniseries that took home two Emmys. The 1994 version starred Molly Ringwald and Rob Lowe, and was written and produced by King himself. It was then revived once again by CBS in 2020 as a nine-episode limited series starring James Marsden, Alexander Skarsgård, Whoopi Goldberg, Amber Heard. Liman's upcoming version will be the first time that The Stand has been adapted theatrically. Fans of the novel have already expressed their frustration with the theatrical version, claiming that a movie isn't enough time to capture the expansive story. 'Unless it's committed to six movies and filmed back to back like Lord of the Rings style I'm not sure there is a reason to make The Stand theatrical,' commented one. 'Multiples movies right? Right? That book CANNOT be told in one film. It simply can't,' wrote another. A third commented, 'Again?! This will be the third attempt. All we want is a Dark Tower series please!' Another wrote, 'I think the scale of The Stand is deserving of the big screen. However, I think it should be a trilogy.' While fans are wary of the big screen adaptation, The Stand appears to be in good hands with Liman directing. Liman was behind some of the most popular action hits of the last few decades, including Edge of Tomorrow, The Bourne Identity, Mr & Mrs Smith, and the recent Road House remake with Jake Gyllenhaal. Both Ben Affleck and George A. Romero have attempted to the develop The Stand for the big screen in the past with little luck. Meanwhile, King currently has a number of projects in the works based on his novels. First up is The Institute, which is set to scare viewers when it hits MGM+ next month. The eight-part limited series follows the terrifying story of Luke Ellis, a 12-year-old prodigy whose life is shattered overnight when he's kidnapped and wakes up inside a shadowy facility known only as The Institute. Inside, he meets other children with psychic abilities who are being subjected to disturbing and painful experiments under the watchful eye of the calculating Ms. Sigsby, played by Emmy-winner Mary-Louise Parker. While the children initially believe that they're there to be taught and cared for, they soon discover that the staff at The Institute are trying to weaponize their powers for evil. King's fans were furious earlier this year when Netflix announced it would be making a reboot of his novel Cujo. Amazon Prime also revealed that they're turning his iconic novel Carrie into a series.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Could we see Caitlin Clark, Drake at NBA Finals? 9 celebrity Thunder, Pacers fans to watch
With the NBA Finals kicking off on Thursday night, Oklahoma City could see a star-studded next couple of weeks at Paycom Center. Both the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers have prominent celebrities in their fan bases. While Okie fans can include Bill Hader, Kristin Chenoweth, James Marsden and courtside fashion icon James Goldstein, the list of Pacers fans also includes heavy hitters as well. Advertisement Pacers fans include actor Mike Epps, "Now You See Me" actor Jesse Eisenberg, talk show host David Letterman, rapper 50 Cent, and WNBA star Caitlin Clark. And then there are fans of the NBA at large who could be making an appearance. These guests could range from former NBA players themselves wishing to watch the action, to different dignitaries with ties to the teams, such as former Vice President and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. Live: Thunder vs Pacers live score updates More: Where will celebrities eat during NBA Finals? OKC restaurants that have drawn stars before While we don't know just yet who will make an appearance in a suite or a courtside seat, here are some celebrities with ties to the Thunder and Pacers who could make an appearance during the NBA Finals. James Marsden The Marvel Cinematic Universe actor and Oklahoma native may make a stop at some point during the NBA Finals. The actor was previously filming in England for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, so he may want to enjoy the Thunder's first Finals run since 2012. Drake World-famous rapper Drake made waves in 2021 when he was spotted sitting courtside on a Wednesday night to watch a Thunder-Rockets game. Advertisement It's unclear if Drake is a Thunder fan, but in 2021, there was talk that Drake was in town to see an old friend or if he came to support Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who, like Drake, is from Toronto. Gilgeous-Alexander hugged Drake after the game, as did Luguentz Dort, another Thunder by way of Canada. The moment went viral when Drake shared a selfie with "my new parents" Renee, 71, and Jim Stanley, 75, of Oklahoma City to his 97.2 million Instagram followers. Rumble greets Drake during Wednesday's Thunder-Rockets game. Bill Hader Comedian and actor Bill Hader attended Game 2 of the 2012 NBA Finals, the last championship run for the Thunder. Though the Thunder went on to lose against the Miami Heat, Hader was still excited to have a professional team from his home state to cheer on at the top of the league. Actor Bill Hader sits courtside as the Oklahoma City Thunder take on the Miami Heat in Game Two of the 2012 NBA Finals at Chesapeake Energy Arena on June 14, 2012 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Kristin Chenoweth The "Wicked" actress shared her support for her home team immediately after the team qualified for the NBA Finals. And if there is a question about her fandom, Chenoweth has performed the national anthem before a game and attended other games throughout the years. Ben Rector The Tulsa native and talented pop singer could be a sign of good luck for the Thunder. Rector opened up Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals against the Minnesota Timberwolves with the national anthem, and the Thunder went on to have a 26-point win over the team. Now the singer is on tour during Game 1 against the Pacers, but with a clear schedule, he could make an appearance at a later game. Mike Pence The former Vice President and Indiana Governor Mike Pence is a proud Pacers fan. Though he has not been documented courtside this season, Pence continues to show his support for the Pacers off the court. Caitlin Clark She plays for the Indiana Fever; it's reasonable to assume that the 2024 Rookie of the Year knows Indiana ball. The Indiana Fever are still in the midst of their season, two games removed from the NBA Finals. Due to her schedule, Clark could make an appearance at a game, but whether that's in Indy or OKC is yet to be determined. Terry Crews Terry Crews may be the host of "America's Got Talent," but he always has time for his Pacer team. The "Brooklyn 99" actor was courtside for Game 3 against the New York Knicks. Mike Epps Indiana native Mike Epps is a major part of Pacer Nation. The actor and comedian has been caught courtside for several games and constantly cheers on the Pacers. He is a frequent guest at the Pacers' home arena, so don't rule out his appearance when the Thunder head to Indiana. This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: NBA Finals: 9 celebrity Thunder, Pacers fans we might see courtside
